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The most common types of mountains are fold mountains. Some fold mountains include the Himalayas, Andes, Rockies, and Alps. This activity showed how plate movement creates folded mountains.When the two continents collide, the plates wrinkle and fold.  Here’s our activity to show this happening.  It’s the same principle as the damp graham cracker we did a few days ago, but this shows the “layers” of the earth folding/wrinkling. Showing how...

We were still talking about plate tectonics on Friday. We talked about how scientists theorize that the continents were once connected as one giant super-continent, Pangaea. I cut out South America and Africa and asked them to fit them together as best the could. When they didn’t fit together perfectly I asked the kids why the continents wouldn’t match perfectly after 250 million years? We talked about erosion and the...

We looked a bit more closely at what happens at fault lines where slight shifts in the crust cause earthquakes. First the kids all made their own layered crust. ED especially enjoyed this! Then we placed an index card in a larger container and created layers on both sides of the paper. We moved the index card back and forth and watched as the grains of rice shifted and moved....

Here’s our hands-on studies of tectonic plate movements, 2nd grade style. We used: a tray with a thin layer of chilled jello (jelly) graham crackers for the earth’s crustal plates colored icing (green-continents and blue-oceans) You can see LD putting the continent and ocean onto his plate (ie. graham cracker). We read about the plates and tectonic plate movement and looked carefully at this map.  We talked about how when...

Today we had our second earth science lesson.  LD begged to do science again and I always love that enthusiasm! I’m still using  Building Foundations of Scientific Understanding: A Science Curriculum for K-2  (affliliate link) as the basis for some of our lessons. *I read an excerpt about how the earth isn’t the only place with gravity. The moon and other planets have gravity too.  We talked about how people...

We have been making slow headway through our Ancient Rome unit, but we needed some new spice added into our homeschool days. We’re off to do a unit on earth science — studying concepts such as gravity, horizontal/vertical, directionality–N,S,E,W, and then moving on to the layers of the earth and the surface of the earth — the “ups and downs, ins and outs” of the landforms and waterforms and how...