NSES Content Standard D  Earth and Space Science: Earth's history Grades 5-8, page 160 The Earth processes we see today, including erosion, movement of lithospheric plates, and changes in atmospheric composition, are similar to those that occurred in the past. Earth history is also influenced by occasional catastrophes, such as the impact of an asteroid or comet.

 
Benchmark 4C The Physical Setting: Processes that Shape the Earth
Grades 6-8, page 73
Thousands of layers of sedimentary rock confirm the long history of the changing surface of the earth and the changing life forms whose remains are found in successive layers. The youngest layers are not always found on top, because of folding, breaking, and uplift of layers.

Science for All Americans Historical Perspectives:
Chapter 10, page 999
The age of the earth was not at issue for most of human history. Until the nineteenth century, nearly everyone in Western cultures believed that the earth was only a few thousand years old, and that the face of the earth was fixed--the mountains, valleys, oceans, and rivers were as they always had been since their instantaneous creation. From time to time, individuals speculated on the possibility that the earth's surface had been shaped by the kind of slow change processes they could observe occurring; in that case, the earth might have to be older than most people believed. If valleys were formed from erosion by rivers, and if layered rock originated in layers of sediment from erosion, one could estimate that millions of years would have been required to produce today's landscape. But the argument made only very gradual headway until English geologist Charles Lyell published the first edition of his masterpiece, Principles of Geology, early in the nineteenth century. The success of Lyell's book stemmed from its wealth of observations of the patterns of rock layers in mountains and the locations of various kinds of fossils, and from the close reasoning he used in drawing inferences from those data.