Life first appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago. How is it possible for scientists to know about the history of life? What methods do they use to study life and the ways it has evolved over time…
Big History weaves evidence and insights about the Universe (and our place in it) from many scientific and historical disciplines into a unified and coherent narrative. The concept of Big History arose from a desire to go beyond specialized and self-contained fields of study to a deeper understanding of history as a whole. Big History explores how we are connected to everything around us, and where we may be heading. It provides a foundation for thinking about the future and the changes that are reshaping our world.
To support your middle and high school students at home, veteran BHP teacher Rachel Hansen will guide students daily through the Big History Project on Khan Academy. She will provide content recommendations for each day, along with a Word of the Day and guiding questions. The Khan Academy version of the course also includes a comprehensive set of practice quizzes and activities for students at home.
If you are a parent who wants a little more support as you use these materials with your kids, sign up as a home school teacher at bhp.oerproject.com and join the BHP Teacher Community. There you’ll find real-time support from other BHP educators and academics as you support your students, and get answers to your own questions.
Rachel teaches at Muscatine High School in Muscatine, IA — where she and her students like to wear flannels on Fridays and name their class plants. She’s taught the Big History Project for six years and serves as a teacher leader for the program. In addition, Rachel is a National Geographic Explorer whose work focuses on storytelling for impact using podcasts. When not teaching social studies, Rachel enjoys going on outdoor adventures, coaching basketball, and dinking around on the piano.
Life first appeared on Earth about 3.8 billion years ago. How is it possible for scientists to know about the history of life? What methods do they use to study life and the ways it has evolved over time…
An asteroid killed the dinosaurs. Or did it? Today we’ll investigate several competing theories about the extinction event that wiped out T-Rex and friends.
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Driving Question… |
The biosphere is an amazing place, serving as the home for all the living things on our planet. It provides us with air to breathe, plus plants, animals, and water to survive. We live in the comfort zone…
How did life begin? Some scientists argue it started in shallow pools of water, while others maintain that it began deep below the surface of the ocean. Still others believe that a meteor from some distant…
Biologists, the leading experts on life, struggle to agree upon a definition for this simple question. Today, we’re going to talk about what life is... and what it isn’t. By the end, we’ll settle on a…
To explain something they observe, scientists often begin with a hypothesis—their best guess about why and how it occurs. Sometimes a new hypothesis generates a lot of controversy, especially in the early…
The surface of the Earth is changing all the time. We’re really all just lava surfers, and we’ve been riding the lava waves for a long time. In fact, it’s now possible for scientists to determine how the…
Leftovers usually aren’t that interesting or important, but the leftovers that circled our Sun just after its birth are another story. Gravity helped to separate that matter by density, forming all the…
Chemistry plays an important role in Big History. The elements born out of the death of stars are what connect our world today with the stars, their death, and the birth of the Universe. The world around…
By 200 million years after the Big Bang, the Universe had become a very dark and cold place. Then things started to change. First, dust and gas formed. Then stars emerged from these clouds of dust and…
One of the most powerful claim testers we have at our disposal in search of the truth is evidence. It’s hard to ignore the kind of facts that you can see and verify. That’s why evidence is so strongly…
Authority is one of the claim testers that helps us decide what to believe. People who are experts gain credibility in their field by consistently demonstrating logical and reliable patterns of thinking…
In Big History, students are presented with a lot of claims. We use the term “claim testing” in Big History to describe the process that someone goes through when evaluating the credibility of an assertion…
The Big Bang remains a mystery in many ways. We have a lot of evidence for what happened just after, but we can only guess at what existed before. Observing the Universe tells us a lot about the Big Bang…
The Big Bang hasn’t always been the generally accepted explanation of how our Universe came to be. In fact, our views on the origin and structure of the Universe have changed drastically over the last…
As the planet has evolved since the beginning of time, everything, including plants, humans, and animals, have gotten more complicated. In Big History, we break up time, or periodize, by using major changes…
History relies on way more than just historians to put together accounts of the past. Archeologists, anthropologists, physicists, cosmologists, and many, many others contribute to our understanding of…
Everything came from somewhere. In this video, we’ll consider those somewheres, and the stories we tell to explain and understand how life, the universe, and everything came to be. You’ll also meet Alphonse…
Today, we’ll learn about the importance of scale when studying history. We’ll think about scales of both time and space, and how they impact our understanding of the past.
This video introduces the Big History Project course on Khan Academy, and your host, Rachel Hansen. You’ll be given a driving question to explore, a word of the day to think about, and video to watch.…