In this activity, students develop a timescale for a person’s life. The techniques of relative and absolute dating are similar to those used in the construction of a geological timescale.
By the end of this activity, students should be able to:
- understand how a timescale is constructed
- understand the difference between relative and absolute dating
- realise that timescale divisions are not of standard lengths like other scientific units of measurement
- recognise stages of a person’s life.
Download the Word file (see link below) for:
- introduction/background notes
- what you need
- what to do
- discussion questions
- extension ideas.
Related content
The construction of geological timescales involves relative and absolute dating, with the date range involved up to 4.6 billion years ago.
Explore the Age of the earth timeline to find out about developments in how geologists discover the ages of rocks and fossils.
Activity ideas
Help your students understand more about dating methods with these other activities:
- Use the activity Which dating method? with your student to learn to recognise some of the different relative and absolute dating methods.
- Using absolute dating methods uses the interactive Absolute dating methods and Absolute dating rock layers – quiz. Students learn about and then choose the best absolute dating method for each layer of rock in a cliff, based on material present in each rock.
- Rock layers and relative dating – observe rocks layers located near Whanganui, watch an animation about how they were formed and use relative dating to work out the order in which the rocks were created in the interactive Relative rock layers.
