Activities
Multiple-Day
Activities
Single-Day
Activities
Did you ever wonder how to take a slow Earth process that occurs in unseen
places and make it come to life in your students' minds? These activities let
your students role-play, work with real data, and create hands-on models to
firm up their understanding of the mechanics and significance of plate
tectonics. Students can use a range of learning modes as they look at patterns
on maps, move simulated plates, write their explanations, and report out loud
what they have learned.
A wonderful thing about these resources is that you can piece them together in
whatever way works best for you and your students. The activities range in
duration from 30 minutes to many days, so you can make selections that fit your
needs and time constraints. Since many of these activities have discovery
components, they will work best if your students do them before they do a lot
of background reading.
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Photograph of Mount St. Helens by Austin
Post, USGS/CVO/Glaciology Project. |
Imagine you are a USGS scientist on vacation and you get a call that you have to
get the President a quick analysis of earthquake and volcano data or your
research funding will be cut. By playing the role of this harried scientist,
your middle school students can feel the excitement associated with helping the
world better understand natural phenomena. The lesson's author compiled
outstanding resources from a variety of trusted sources, including Access
Excellence, the NASA SciFiles, and National Geographic XPeditions. As they
publish their work online, the students join a worldwide community of young
scientists from Englewood, New Jersey, to Lima, Peru. Students can develop
scientific ways of thinking as they form hypotheses, gather data, and look for
patterns. When students consider the impacts of earthquakes and volcanoes, as
well as the ecological changes resulting from plate movement, they discover how
the plate movements have affected people's lives. MSP full record
Students look at four uniform maps with data (volcanic, seismic, geochronologic,
geographic) to predict where lithospheric plate edges are and in what
directions they are moving. The students initially develop the maps and
identify patterns using their own vocabulary, which helps them sidestep their
fear of scientific jargon. Once the students have discovered the patterns in
the data, the terms and more facts are introduced. You may prefer to use the
teacher's guide as a pdf file because it shows all of the author’s notes. A
special feature of this activity is that the maps are uniform; this makes it is
easier for students to compare the four sources of data. Currently the author
makes hard copies of the maps available at cost because most teachers do not
have the color widebed plotter required to print them from the files available
online. MSP full record
This simple but elegant activity asks students to model the creation of the new
ocean floor that results from sea-floor spreading. Students see how the rising
basaltic magma creates a mirror effect when the new ocean floor is generated
and how the creation of new rock at the rift zone is evidence of plate
tectonics. The background information for teachers explains the physical
features of the lithosphere, plate boundaries, and ocean floor. In addition, it
offers a historical perspective that the teacher may share with students to
illustrate how a new technology to detect evidence of magnetic polarity
provided another way to test the hypotheses leading to the development of the
plate tectonics theory. MSP full record
Here's a delicious way for your students to model the different plate
interactions. This activity stresses how the density, thickness, and pliability
of the plates have a big effect on how they interact at their boundaries.
Students can create drawings of the different interactions as an assessment.
You can also ask students to explain to the group what they saw happening when
the plates moved apart from, collided with, and slid past each another. Ask
student to consider how long it takes for these movements to happen in reality.
MSP full record
Students use online seismic activity data as they work in pairs to determine the
areas on a world map where they think the plate boundaries exist. Since they
are generating these boundary lines themselves, it is better if they have not
already seen maps illustrating the plates. You may want to discuss other plate
tectonic evidence as a follow-up to this activity. MSP full record
Is the availability of computers with Internet access somewhat limited in your
classroom? If the answer is yes, you can use the components of this lesson that
offer students both on- and offline activities. It features an online portion
for students to work through a tutorial about lithospheric plate interactions,
a nine-question quiz, and a wordsearch. Offline, students discuss vocabulary
and fit together paper models of Africa and South America.
When students progress through the pages of this resource, they can see where
earthquakes, volcanoes, and mountain building have occurred on Earth. Questions
throughout the activity require the students to interpret data on maps to
explain the nature of the Earth's crust and the interactions that take place
within it. MSP full record
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Copyright
November 2004 — The Ohio State University. This material is based upon work
supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0424671. Any
opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this
material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of
the National Science Foundation.
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This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons License.
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