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I need some good ideas inc. visuals of how to teach plate tectonics/continental drift


HappyGrace
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I am not very familiar with this and the TOG teacher pages don't give me enough to go on. I know plate tectonics/continental drift/volcanoes are related but I need a quick way to learn/teach this! And I'd love to use a visual-maybe with the skin of an orange or something? We are going to do an edible model of the layers of the earth but I need some other visual for the plate moving stuff-to show the different ways the plates collide or whatever.

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We're using CPO Earth Science so I'm familiar with that website.

 

Under presentation slides on the left side of this page select Unit 4 The Changing Earth. For each section in chapter 11 Plate Tectonics (and for every chapter, btw) there are powerpoint slides. Under 11.1, you'll find what is plate tectonics, pangaea, movement of continents and evidence for continental drift. The slides are taken from the CPO text.

 

On the right side on that same page, under "skill and practice sheets" for the same chapter, there are a few scientist bios and a map of the earth's largest plates that can be labeled and colored.

 

Chapter 12 is earthquakes and volcanoes. I expect you can find similar resources under "presentation slides" and "skill and practice sheets" for those topics :) Just flipping through the book, there's a nice map of earthquakes and plate boundaries in section 12.1 and another for the ring of fire in 12.2------check the slides for those.

 

Obviously, these will work best for your 5th grader but I'm sure you'd be able to discuss the topics at a 2rd grader's level as well.

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We took a phone book and cut it in half thru the pages. Then we taped the loose ends with duct tape. These were our plates.

We showed different movements of the plates by moving the phone books. Slide one under the other (to bump it up) to show subduction. Show transforming by moving the "plates" past each other (grinding). Converging is when two plates move toward each other--do it with the book pieces. Diverging is when two plates move away from each other.

Look up how plate movement makes volcanoes and earthquakes likely (dd can't remember and neither can I! lol)

 

You can show folding of the land to make mountains--just push on the ends of a phone book you haven't cut.

There are also oceanic plates. Maybe you could cut up another phone book and make one half blue.

She says when an oceanic plate and a continental plate converge, they subduct--the oceanic plate goes under because it is heavier.

Two converging continental plates crumble because they are light and that makes a volcano or a mountain.

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This activity looks fun to me: http://circle.adventist.org/files/nadscience5-8/Print%20Materials/ACTIVITIES/ES-TECTONIC%20SNACKS.pdf It uses graham crackers and frosting to model tectonics.

 

This web site has some good information with visuals.

 

ETA: Drat. I just realized I left off the address for that second page. Sorry about that, this is what I meant to post: http://www.windows2universe.org/earth/interior/plate_tectonics.html&edu=elem

Edited by MamaSheep
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Wow, these are great! Exactly what I'm looking for!!!!!

 

LuckyMama-that was NOT the website I got the pages from, but it is just what I need! I am going to have to look into that site more-I've heard talk on here about CPO sci and never investigated. Great site! The slides are perfect and the skill pages too. THANK YOU!!

 

The dc will love the hands-on stuff too, thanks, ladies! They remember it so much better that way. (Today we measured length of Noah's Ark outside with string-WOW-what an eye opener! They will never forget it.)

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A giant-sized Milky Way bar works well. Cut it in half with a knife, then push the two halves together and watch the chocolate crack and be pushed up into a "mountain range."

 

We also made models of earth layers with different colors of clay, about the size of an adult's hand. Kids pushed two sets together from different sides of the table, really pushing hard, and again the layers will push up, cracks will develop, etc.

 

You can also put the two stacks of layered clay, with little features like rivers or hills that go across the divide, on small pieces of wood, then push them past one another sideways to show how a slip-strike fault moves the landscape past another piece... if that makes any sense.

 

You can also google maps of recent earthquakes, and then you'll see the Ring of Fire around the Pacific where the plates subduct.

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It doesn't sound as good as it was when I write it down because the best part was all the discussion that was generated, but first we looked at a few books I had about cont. drift, plate tectonics, etc. A particularly good one they loved was Can You Believe-Volcanos. A great one for layers of the earth that made it more fun was "How to Dig a Hole to the Other Side of the Earth." I had a matching game type thing for the continents in Pangea that I got a long time ago from a Montessori site. We read a biographical page from the CPO site (linked in this thread) about Wegener and labeled the major plate on an illustration from there. We looked at several websites for illustrations and info, and the ones with animation were a big hit. We used most of the ones linked on this thread. We just did movements of the plates with our hands rather than with the PB and graham crackers because the animation on the one from Karen in CO was so great we didn't need to do it! We did the model of the layers of earth that was on that same site (with cherry, marshmallow, rice krispies, etc.) They LOVED that.

 

Like I said, it sounds lame when I write it out, but in real life there were so many great connections made and everything just came together better than I could have imagined. The proof: they sat for about two hours after BY CHOICE making diagrams and illustrations and labeling them and writing out paragraphs of information about all we had covered!!!

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