This week, students completed a study of their environment with a specific focus on landforms. You would think that the main goal would be for students to be able to identify landforms and their characteristics, but we wanted to take things a step further to engage our learners and allow them to interact at higher levels with this content. To tackle that goal, we designed instruction about landforms in the following sequence:
1. To solidify a conceptual understanding of landforms and their features, science teachers designed opportunities for students to carefully research each landform and allowed students the opportunity to design a display. This allowed students to work collaboratively and use critical thinking to create their model, and required that they use their research to make decisions about their design.
2. In social studies, students read about how landforms impact communities. They explored the lifestyle benefits and challenges of living near certain landforms, and the resources that these landforms provide for humans. We also looked at many maps of landforms that helped us solidify our understanding of where major landforms are located in the United States.
3. We are currently focusing on the genre of poetry in reading and writing, so students were challenged to create a landform poem that not only communicates the characteristics of the landform, but uses poetic structure and elements to describe their landform in a creative way.
Pictured below are several examples of these 3 engaging tasks!!
Beckett's humorous poem about a peninsula.
Sam's free verse about the elements of the river.
Nate's hauntingly beautiful poem about the ocean.
