Floodplain Modeling

Three days of erosion exploration await your elementary geologists. Learners begin by examining rivers via Google Earth, then they model water flow in sand, and finally, they identify resulting landforms. This lesson is written...

Blow your learners' minds with a sweet lesson on nanotechnology that uses sugar to demonstrate the difference nanoscale surface area makes in dissolving and crystal formation. Plenty of supportive background information is read to...

Young geologists piece together the puzzle of plate tectonics in an earth science lesson. Given a physical map of the world, they search for land formations that indicate the location of different types of plate boundaries.

Even light cannot leave the force of a black hole! Learners use a model to explore the gravitational force of a black hole. An elastic bandage and heavy ball serve to create the hole, while marbles become the victims of its strong force.

In the NGSS, one of the performance expectations is for the children to develop a model to represent the shapes and kinds of land and bodies of water in an area. In the science practices, the children also must develop and use models....

Collaborative earth science groups create a working model of a watershed. Once it has been developed, you come along and introduce a change in land use, impacting the quality of water throughout their watershed. Model making is an...

By constructing a watershed model and identifying watershed features in it, they discover how water erosion changes the landscape. As with most watershed modeling activities, this one is costly in terms of time and materials. It is,...

Fifth and sixth graders are introduced to the primary landforms of Illinois and discover how they were created. Landform cards are made for each pupil. They use the twenty-questions format until they have identified each one. Then,...

Students explore the impact of changing river volumes and different floodplain terrain in experimental trials with table top-sized riverbed models. The models are made using modeling clay in aluminum baking pans placed on a slight...

While the content of this lesson is more specific to the first grade, the directions given to work on a PowerPoint are well written. These directions could be used by anyone, with any content. Younger learners may need help reading the...