Curriculum and Additional Educational Resources

Students will play a game where a volunteer plays a fish that sinks to the bottom of the lake after death. The remaining students will slowly cover the volunteer with their jackets, showing how over time organisms are covered with sediment and slowly become a fossil.

Using a simple three or four generation family tree, students construct a relatives time tree that mimics the major divisions of the geologic time scale, Precambrian, Paleozoic, Mesozoic, and Cenozoic.

Students will recreate the Florissant Formation stratigraphic column (or any rock formation you would like to use) using food materials. Each food item will represent a specific layer of the Florissant Formation (or rock formation).

In this lesson plan, students will roll homemade dice to discover if their organism became a fossil or not to demonstrate how difficult it is for an organism to be preserved.

During this six-part activity, students investigate climate and climate change. Using fossil leaves from southwestern Wyoming and modern leaves from their area, students classify leaves, determine mean annual temperature and precipitation using leaf margin and leaf area analysis, analyze climate data (temperature and precipitation), and make statements about climate change.

Understanding the effects of climate change in the past, present, and future. Learn how desert wetlands evolved over time.

Many of the fossils found in the paper shales of the Florissant Formation formed through a process called carbonization. Students will get the chance to make compressions of plants in this activity and may use paint to mimic the carbonization process.