The primary goal of ERTH1006 is to introduce students to the world of Earth Sciences and develop an appreciation for the planet that we live on. Although the course includes lab sections where students learn to identify rocks and minerals and learn to work with topographic and geological maps, a primary goal of ERTH1006 is to teach the importance of scale and the relationships between rock types so that the students can think about the interpretation of the geological features they are seeing. For this reason, ERTH1006 includes a one-day compulsory field trip to three localities in the Ottawa area. This localities include the three major rock types, igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic, and students see the record of faults, weathering and erosion, sedimentary structures, seafloor organisms, plate tectonics and climate recorded in the rocks, and they are able to place those rocks into a spatial and temporal framework. At the end of the day, the student can decipher the geological history of the Ottawa area from 1.5 billion years ago to today, based entirely on their observations at the three localities.