My kids all decided that they wanted to learn about volcanoes. For whatever reason, this choice did not inspire me–perhaps because it left me thinking, “How on earth am I going to take six weeks to talk about volcanoes?!” But the more I thought about it, the more interesting stuff there was that connected to the topic of volcanoes. In fact, as I began writing about this unit study, I discovered that we hit so many topics and used so many resources that this post was becoming impossibly long, so I am breaking this into several smaller posts for sanity. Stay tuned for more as I get it written!
I started by making a list of topics I wanted to hit, as well as the order I thought most logical, and then I went hunting for resources. I hit the jackpot when I stumbled on the American Red Cross Masters of Disaster materials. For our purposes, I settled on the Level Two earthquake-themed materials, but the site was so cool that I linked you to the main page (apparently hosted by PBS, despite the differing address listed on the materials) so you could admire all of the topic options.
Earth’s Layers and Plate Tectonics
This was the only aspect of our study I actually remembered to photograph. It was also delicious.
Using the Masters of Disaster downloadable packet (link in above paragraph), we started by studying the makeup of the earth, reading about its layers and graphing the depth of each. The packet suggested an Earth’s Layers cake, but I couldn’t settle for their simple setup; I had to go all-out with a DIY Earth’s Layers Cake that I crafted. Continue reading
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