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I'm a new teacher and am teaching my 7th graders about Plate Tectonics. Any fun and interactive activities I can do with my students to help them learn this topic?? Thanks!

Hi Megan and welcome to the discussion threads! Your students might like this interactive site on plates and boundaries and plate tectonics.
Also, there are some interesting contributions from other participants at this discussion thread: Earth and Space Science > pangea inquiry. You may find some fun ideas there, too. I look forward to others' ideas on this topic.
Carolyn

Thank you Carolyn! The website you gave me is great!

Hi Megan, I am an elementary teacher, but I am sure that your students would love this activity. To get a visual model of how plates move you could use graham crackers and icing. Students will put the icing on wax paper and use the graham crackers as the plates. Students will get a visual of how divergent boundaries creates new land like the MidAtlantic ridge, how convergent boundaries can create mountains (you may need to wet the graham crackers a bit for that one) and how subduction zones work. I hope this helps. Here's a really good interactive site for students. I put this on my blackboard account and students can access it at home. http://www.learner.org/interactives/dynamicearth/index.html Good Luck, Jessica

The USGS and Geology.com have some wonderful activities for plate tectonics. There are some very good ideas for sea-floor spreading, magnetism, and 'ring of fire' at http://geology.com/teacher/plate-tectonics.shtml. Other resources are available at http://education.usgs.gov/primary.html#platetectonics. A fairly simple activity is 'Wegener's Puzzling Evidence' which is a puzzle that kids can use to deduce how the continents fit together. It is designed for 1-2 class periods, and is standards-based.

Megan, We just finished plate tectonics w/ 6th grade and they are actually preparing to take their test this week. The previous posts have excellent resources, and I recommend the Pangaea puzzle activity. One of the things that worked well is following up the activities w/ a lot of animations and video for continental drift and plate tectonics. Once I showed the animation of Pangaea breaking up into today's continents, there was a loud "OHHHHH" in the class, lol. Here are some of my resources: http://www.diigo.com/user/misscheska/plate-tectonics%20animations Also, the girls enjoyed coming up with ideas on how Earth would look like 250 million years from now. I then shared Scotese's idea of Pangaea Ultima (URL: http://www.scotese.com/future2.htm) and asked to compare/contrast his figure with theirs.

Mountain Maker, Earth Shaker (Plate Tectonics Activity),

Take a hard-boiled egg and crack its shell. Does the egg remind you of anything? The Earth, perhaps? The egg could be seen as a tiny model of the Earth. The thin shell represents the Earth's crust, divided into plates; within the shell is the firm but slippery mantle. Move the pieces of shell around. Notice how the shell buckles in some places and exposes 'mantle' in other places. The same thing happens on Earth, but on Earth, this activity results in the formation of mountains, earthquakes, and new ocean floor.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aso/tryit/tectonics/

A terrific Deep Time resource for teaching is in the PBS Evolution site at http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/change/deeptime/

Dorothy

I teach 5th gr science. I'm putting together a study on the plates and will have students focus on earthquakes specifically. These interactive websites are fantastic. I just looked at them and they are just what I was looking for. I will definately incorporate them into my lesson planning. Thank you all for your suggestions.

I use candy to show the different plate interactions. Twizzlers = oceanic crust; Snickers = continental crust. The kids have some fun smashing the candies together to see the different results of plate movement. It's great for hands-on learners. Afterwards, we work on making our own analogies for how the plates interact. I've had the kids do "interprative dances" to show the different ways the plates can move, along with an explanation. The kids have to draw the analogy, explain the analogy and then perform the analogy for each of the plate boundaries.

How important is the theory of Seafloor Spreading to understanding Plate Tectonics as a whole? My department has included as part of the curriculum map, and I've dutifully taught it all these years, even though I've never really thought of it as anything more than a very specific example of Plate Tectonics. It seems to me that a better way to go would be to first teach Continental Drift and the Layers of the Earth and Earthquakes and Volcanoes and THEN teach Plate Tectonics and using Seafloor Spreading as an example of a divergent boundary. So, I dunno, just looking for a few thoughts.

I teach 5th grade Earth Science in NYC. Our Scope and Sequence begins teaching plate tectonics in the elementary grades. By Middle School they should be able to get into more in depth content that you are talking about. This is reserved for the upper grades 8th-HS. My focus is on the layers of the earth, earthquakes and volcanoes. I believe they are the basics. The students learn the vocabulary foundations and watch videos, build models. It gives them the foundations to understand the more technical concepts.

Ahh cool, then. Looks like I'm on the right track. The kids come to me with very little science background. They teach physical science in 6th grade, and there are standards in science before then, but in terms of rigorous scientific thought... not that much. Seventh grade is life science, and they start to reallythink scientifically, our 7th grade department does a great job at preparing the kids, but there are still gaps and they're still behind what they should be. But, Ok, huzzah! I've inserted earthquakes and volcanoes into this year's curriculum, and will do so for next year as well. And, I'll carry through on my plan to make seafloor spreading the theory become seafloor spreading the evidence next year. Thank you for your input!

I like using Oreo cookies for the engage/explore of a 5E model lesson on plate movement. We discuss the similarities and differences of our cookie model...how the crust = cookie and the mantle = cookie filling, and discuss how the core does not fit into this model. Then we crack our crust into at least two plates and the students move their "crust" to mimic a divergent boundary and convergent continental - continental and continental - oceanic crust boundary. And then the students get to experience the tension of a transform boundary, and we discuss what would happen if we "forced" the cookies to slide past each other. When they are done, they get to eat their cookie model. :-) After this lesson we go into more detail on plate tectonics....but the cookies really help get them hooked and help them remember.

Here's a website for using a puzzle as a method to teach plate tectonics, students need to put together a map of 'before' based on the shapes of the landmasses. You might also start off by just giving students a basic puzzle and have them do a little competition where they race to put together the puzzles. Ask the teams that do it fastest after they're finished to explain how they put the puzzle together (i.e. puzzle piece sizes, similar pictures on adjacent pieces, etc). Then you can explain that the same characteristics were used by Wegener to come up with his plate tectonic theory as well.