Look inside the Earth Science pack.
No sign-up, no email required. Here is a real week, a real rubric, a real lab-notebook page, and a real demonstration — the actual materials, not a brochure. Every sample links to the full artifact it’s drawn from.
One week, two days on the Earth.
The course runs on a two-day pulse — about two hours a day, across roughly 32 weeks. Here is week one of Unit 1 — Earth’s Structure & Plate Tectonics: the student reads the Earth’s own record for real before a single boundary type is memorized.
- Earth’s layers & plate boundaries
- Seafloor spreading & paleomagnetism
- Reading: Wegener & continental drift
- Read P- & S-wave arrivals
- Triangulate the epicenter
- Interpret a plate-boundary map
How “mastered” is actually judged.
Every skill is scored at one of three levels against a published bar — no points, no curve. Here is one criterion from the Earth’s Structure & Plate Tectonics rubric — lab technique: triangulation & maps — shown exactly the way a parent or guide reads it:
| Level | What it looks like — “Read a seismogram & map” |
|---|---|
| Developing | Cannot read a seismogram or a plate-boundary map. |
| Proficient | Reads the traces but misplaces the epicenter or the boundary. |
| Mastery | Triangulates an epicenter from three seismograms and interprets a plate-boundary map, defending each call. |
Browse the full rubric set → · How this becomes an A–F grade →
The artifact a student builds, keeps, and defends.
The lab notebook isn’t busywork — it’s the primary record, kept in pen at the bench and defended out loud. Here is one real Field & Lab Day, every section kept live — note the struck-through streak-test slip and the honest sources of error.
| Test | Result |
|---|---|
| Luster | metallic |
| Streak | dark reddish-brown |
| Hardness | ~6 (scratches glass, not nail) |
| Magnet | weakly attracted |
- Dated & titled entries
- A testable question & hypothesis
- Units on every number
- Significant figures, honestly reported
- Calculations shown, not just answers
- Pen in real time — struck, not erased
- Error analysis with direction & size
The moment that can’t be faked.
Three times a year, a student performs and defends a demonstration — standing with their own work and reasoning aloud while an adult asks unscripted follow-ups. In the timed map interpretation, they triangulate an earthquake from three seismograms and defend the epicenter they place.
“P-waves reached all three stations first; the S–P gaps put me 180, 240, and 310 km out. Where the three arcs cross is the epicenter — right along the ridge, which fits: that’s a divergent boundary, so shallow quakes are exactly what I’d expect.”
A passing answer from the timed map-interpretation defense — reasoning from the seismograms and the boundary, not reciting a definition.
The whole pack, ready for a binder.
Everything here is on the web to read — and every rubric, checklist, and guide also has a print-ready packet version, formatted 8.5×11 for a clipboard or a three-ring binder. You assemble the student’s binder from the pack itself; there’s nothing else to buy to hold it in your hands. We’ve put them all in binder order on one page: Assemble the Earth Science binder →
Seen enough to start?
The whole Earth Science pack is open to read and print. Open it and begin, or ask us a question first — a real person answers.