1. Teacher Guide
This lesson is designed to teach kids to ask a critical thinking question that you can’t just put into a search box to solve. To do that, we encourage them with smaller questions that search can help them answer. Make sure that you read the notes for each slide: they not only give you teaching tips but also provide answers and hints so you can help the kids if they are having trouble.
Remember, you can always send feedback to the Bing in the Classroom team at You can learn more about the program at bing.com/classroom and follow the daily lessons on our Partners In Learning site.
Want to extend today’s lesson? Consider using Skype in the Classroom to arrange for your class to chat with another class in today’s location. And if you are using Windows 8, you can also use the Bing apps to learn more about this location and topic; the Travel and News apps in particular make great teaching tools.
Ja'Dell Davis is a Los Angeles native who currently divides her time between New York City and Madison, Wisconsin. She is currently a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, pursing a PhD in Sociology. Ja’Dell previously taught high school in Philadelphia public schools, and implemented college access and academic enrichment programming in Chester, Pennsylvania and New York City in Manhattan’s Lower East Side neighborhood. Ja’Dell received her B.A. from Swarthmore College with a special major in History and Educational Studies, and a minor in Black Studies. She completed her M.S.Ed in Secondary School Education at the University of Pennsylvania.  In addition to her studies and work in the education field, Ja’Dell is a dancer, musician, avid people watcher, and Scrabble enthusiast.
This lesson is designed to teach the Common Core State Standard: Reading: Informational Text
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.8.2Determine a central idea of a text and analyze its development over the course of the text, including its relationship to supporting ideas; provide an objective summary of the text.
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.8.3Analyze how a text makes connections among and distinctions between individuals, ideas, or events (e.g., through comparisons, analogies, or categories).
CCSS.ELA-Literacy.RI.8.4Determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in a text, including figurative, connotative, and technical meanings; analyze the impact of specific word choices on meaning and tone, including analogies or allusions to other texts.

2. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?
© Kevin Schafer/Minden Pictures
Having this up as kids come in is a great settle down activity. You can start class by asking them for thoughts about the picture or about ideas on how they could solve the question of the day.

3. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time
How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time? How old are you on the geological calendar?
On the geological calendar, Lassen Volcanic National Park is very young. The Painted Dunes’ colorful hills resulted from one of several eruptions from the nearby Cinder Cone, a volcano that last erupted sometime in the mid-1600s. Southwest of the dunes is the park’s namesake Lassen Peak, which erupted in Where catastrophic geologic events are concerned, a century is but a blink of an eye.
Depending on time, you can either have students read this silently to themselves, have one of them read out loud, or read it out loud yourself.

4. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?1
Web Search
What is geology? What do you imagine geological features could tell you about time? 2
What is a geological calendar? 3
Image Search
Find an visual representation of a geological calendar. 4
Web search
According to the geological calendar, when did humans arrive? 5
Thinking
What does this method of understanding time communicate to the reader?
There are a couple of ways to use this slide, depending on how much technology you have in your classroom. You can have students find answers on their own, divide them into teams to have them do all the questions competitively, or have each team find the answer to a different question and then come back together. If you’re doing teams, it is often wise to assign them roles (one person typing, one person who is in charge of sharing back the answer, etc.)

5. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?5
Minutes
You can adjust this based on how much time you want to give kids. If a group isn’t able to answer in 5 minutes, you can give them the opportunity to update at the end of class or extend time.

6. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?1
Web Search
What is geology? What do you imagine geological features could tell you about time? 2
What is a geological calendar? 3
Image Search
Find an visual representation of a geological calendar. 4
Web search
According to the geological calendar, when did humans arrive? 5
Thinking
What does this method of understanding time communicate to the reader?
You can ask the students verbally or let one of them come up and insert the answer or show how they got it. This way, you also have a record that you can keep as a class and share with parents, others.

7. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?1
Web Search
What is geology? What do you imagine geological features could tell you about time?
Possible query: “what is geology”
From a Bing Search result:
the science that deals with the earth's physical structure and substance, its history, and the processes that act on it.

8. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?2
Web Search
What is a geological calendar?
Possible query: “what is a geological calendar”
From Wikipedia (
The Geologic Calendar is a scale in which the geological lifetime of the earth is mapped onto a calendrical year; that is to say, the day one of the earth took place on a geologic January 1 at precisely midnight, and today's date and time is December 31 at midnight.

9. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?3
Image Search
Find an visual representation of a geological calendar.
Using the “images” link on the Bing search page, and the search term “geological calendar”, find an image here:

10. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?4
Web search
According to the geological calendar, when did humans arrive?
Possible queries: “geological calendar” “humans on the geological calendar”
From Wikipedia (
The first Anatomically modern humans did not arrive until around 11:48 p.m. on New Year's Eve, and all of human history since the end of the last ice-age occurred in the last 82.2 seconds before midnight of the new year.

11. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?5
Thinking
What does this method of understanding time communicate to the reader?
Students should reflect on how this method of presenting geologic time is meant to impress the reader – what is the impact of this format?

12. How does the geological calendar affect your conception of time?
This slide is a chance to summarize the information from the previous slides to build your final answer to the question.