Description

The Soils, Rocks, and Landforms Module provides students with firsthand experiences with soils and rocks and modeling experiences using tools such as topographic maps and stream tables to engage with the surface of Earth’s landscape—the shape and the composition of landforms and the stories they tell of past events.

Student engagement with these ideas is driven by four anchor phenomena that drive students to investigate weathering by water, ice, wind, living organisms; breaking rocks into smaller pieces; erosion or movement of earth materials to new locations; and deposition, the result of that transport process that builds new land. They investigate these phenomena:

• Anchor phenomenon 1—pile of earth material on the schoolyard
• Anchor phenomenon 2—impact to Mount St. Helens
• Anchor phenomenon 3—earth-shaking events
• Anchor phenomenon 4—rock layers, flat and tilted

Students plan and carry out investigations by incrementally changing specific environmental conditions to determine the impact of changing the variables of slope and amount of water in stream tables. Students analyze and interpret data from diagrams and visual representations to build explanations from evidence and make predictions of future events. They develop model mountains and represent the landforms from different perspectives to look for change. Students gain experiences that will contribute to the understanding of the crosscutting concepts of patterns; cause and effect; scale, proportion, and quantity; systems and system models; and stability and change.