Plate Tectonics!

Now I am late for bed. More tomorrow...........

yeh, I read the syllabus and I have some teeny tweka that Id suggest. Like you didnt seem to start at the beginning enough for me. Im assuming that these kids have had NO introduction to earth science at all. SO your going to start with something that interests you? Mountain building laws say that one way mountains are built is by earth collisions that relate to things moving sideways (not up and down). Like 2 rugs clashing together. SO use a rug to explain mountain building (plate collisions). Plate tectonics is but one of about 4 mechanisms. For fairness , I think you should have mountain building first then explain that , Raising land from volcanoes, releasing of weight, sedimentation and gravity unweighting, faulting, Erosion of sulfates and limestones in ocean basins and then freezing of the ocens and raising of the land into carved limestone mountains , and then finish big time with plate tectonics. If you introduce a topic with no interconnection to earth processesI think the kids wont have any idea that plate tectonics accounts for a large percentage of islands and mountains , but not all/
Sorry, dont wanna be a noodge but I see 5th graders asking questions that you better be prepared for. The only difference between graduate school and fifth grade is that we expect the proofs to be in calculus.

Webster thinks both constructions are valid.


Personally I would prefer the plural. I like the analogy with "dynamics", which is what plate tectonics basically are.

The area in which I live was created...well altered, would be more accurate....by a hot spot, the "Bermuda hotspot" to be exact, Wiki has a decent little page about it.

It's still a pretty hot area if you know anything about the New Madrid Fault. There is a link on the Bermuda page to the Mississippi Embayment page, then that page links to the fault.

Farmerman, I'm thinking they'd have some background in earth science, but nothing too deep. I'd have to check the standards again. I like the rug idea.

If I start with something that interests kids, I'd think I'd start with the volcanoes or the hydrothermal vents of the rift systems. I'm not sure mountain building is as exciting.

I scrapped the PT lessons. I couldn't figure out how to fit them into just 5 lessons. I'm sticking closer to the frameworks and working on slow and fast Earth-surface changing processes. Water, wind, temperature, glaciers, volcanoes and earthquakes. Oh, and humans. I might throw in a PT intro at the start of the volcano and earthquake sections. As it is, each lesson plan is a lot more involved than I usually make them just so I can cover it all.

Thanks for the help though, I do like to think about PT.

Thats a good idea . Plate Tectonics is only one of a dozen or so earth energy processes, and I like your breakdown of fast and slow.

Remembe, each one of these processes leaves tracks in the earth and giving the kids real-world examples, allows them to go visit such sites during family outings etc. Massachussets is a good example if you compare the "Physiographic provinces" to the earth energy processes. Youve got great glacial terrains and features, Great Triassic lowlands of the Connecticut valleywhere the last round of plate Tectonics has pulled apart Europe and North America terrains . Youve also got some great continental collision structures of the Western part of the state. In it all are processes that are fast, moderate and slow, (geologically speaking)

I would draw a line across Pa or New York from SE to NW and lay ouit the physiographic provinces. From that we can discuss the geologic processes that formed these areas. Its great in the Appalachians and New England because everything has a NE-SW running "Fabric" .That means that the axis of the "rug folds" lie from NE to SW. and if you cut a cross section through the fabric, you find examples of many processes in motion.

Id suggest a book on the entire Tectonics of he Maritime Provinces of Canada called, The Last Billion Years.
Its written by the Atlantic Geoscience Society (2001) Nimbus Publishing , Halifax N.S. Its loaded with pictures and diagrams and is not too technical for motivated kids. I reccomend it highly.

You know, when R. E. Lee was working on the Mississippi River in the early 1840s, he built huge wing coffer dams on the Illinois side to drive the river back to the Missouri side (the river was moving away from St. Louis after the 1811/12 earthquakes). East St. Louis and Belleville are built upon the back-fill from those coffer dams, and the river filled the cofferdams (wing cofferdams are open at one end) through a natural process. If they ever have another big one, East St. Louis, and possibly Belleville, will be headed for Louisiana.

I can brink them to see volcanic rock and glacial striations within their town.

As for the human element, I was thinking about starting with the footpaths of tsankawe - will kids gets this?

Yes!

I sure think so.

I'd have loved it.

If only I could find a better picture. Seeing this had a profound effect on me, but I was in my 20s.

About 45 miles south of Springfield Mass, off US 91 is a Conn Museum of Triassic Dinosaur footprints. (When they dont know what species , they just call em "ichnofossils") The kids can make plaster casts and get all sloppy. ALSO,. Youve got neat glacial mixed tills in cross-sections in Stratford NH, Have the kids think about how the glaciers formed Cape Cod and make them find out where the original late Pleistocene "beaches were " in E Mass.(How far out in the present Ocean was actually forested) Also, there are specimens of Paleo Indian culture from a site in Bull Brook Mass.

Too bad you cant take kids on field trips anymore without all the supervisory and admin bullshit.

I have to go through some of the same crap. When I have my students do a series of field problems I have to get all my field sites approved and settled with the U legal dept before the semester starts. (we just cant hop into the dept vehicles and go like when I was in school ). Also, I have to keep changing the field sites every year because the upper class majors will "rent" their field maps from one class to another. Grad students dont usually do it because they know that their careers are more on the line and I always throw in a little "geo -kicker" that allows me to track " site carry over" from one class to the next.

It's a natural development fm similar to the one I mentioned on some thread or other concerning the CAUTION- CLEANING IN PROGRESS sign being a scientific effect caused by a knocked over pint combined with the sexual selection process involving the successful manufacturers of CAUTION-CLEANING IN PROGRESS signs.

At least you are getting paid. Such small mercies are denied us. The stench of the disinfectant was the worst but I'm not a disinfectant manufacturer so I'll admit subjectivity on that point.

A good demonstration of plate tetonics for 5th graders would be to place two light-weight cloth towels on a flat surface with edges touching. Have one of the kids slowly push the edges of the two towels together several times. Sometimes the edges will fight each other and end up forming accordian pleats (colliding plates). Other times one of the edges of the towels will give way and create a subdution zone which lifts the other towel edge high into the air (subduction zones). Also have them place the two towel edges close together and slowly slide the towels in parallel directions. Occassionally the loops in the terry cloth catch on each other and then suddenly slip when enough pressure is stored up in the side-by-side friction (slip faults).

You can demonstrate the action of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge in plate tetonics and continental drift by placing two more towels on the outside edges of the earlier towels and slowly pushing the middle two towel edges apart. The edges of the middle two towels will cause the outer two towels to move apart from each other in various methods of plate tetonics.

Lil'k, check out the images at these links:

http://www.answers.com/topic/tsankawi

http://www.discoverwalking.com/blog/walking-in-tsankawi.php

check out the rock ladder on this page

http://kevingong.com/Hiking/TsankawiTrail.html

http://cedarweb.hao.ucar.edu/workshop/archive/2006/DSCN2750.JPG

Butrfly - have you been there? Maybe I'm dissatisfied because I've seen it. I want a picture to portray all I saw. May not be possible. Maybe I need to take a trip to NM.

I like the dishtowel idea.

Farmerman, will you come lecture my class when I get one? (mostly kidding).

Nope, haven't been there. But, got quite a lecture on it between Asherman and BumblebeeBoogie when I visited with them a couple years ago. I recall seeing a few PBS/Discovery type specials on the area and peoples too.

Just did a Google search on it and found those for you. There is an aerial shot of it too if you want to have that visual. I think the close up with people walking through it gives more of a visual impact though. You get to see the size relationships between all the elements. That rock ladder was pretty impressive too.

Even though its just a special condition in plate tectonics mehanisms, a way to show kids the concept of "gravity gliding" (a mechanism in which large blocks of earth are slid over other blocks to create compressional features like the Appalachian Piedmont) is the famous Hubbert and Rubey "beer can experiment".

Take a flat desk top and make a puddle of water on it(hope you have glass covers on teachers desks) , then take an opened empty soda can ( a beer can would probably get you fired) use an old fashioned "chuch key" to make a few more holes in the can top (maybe 4) . Then lay the soda can upside down in the puddle. After the can comes to temperature, it will begin moving just by tapping on one side. It will skid right along on the water demonstrating that plastic defomation of overlying rocks can occur by the crust using the natural lubrication of underlying wet shales and claystones.



This demonstrates that " crustal plates" which would have the texture of boiled spaghetti, dont actually "push" against each other, but are "rafted" against or away from each other. The plates actually ride(float) over top the moving mantle like a colored layer in a lava lamp. A lava lamp is actually a cool way to show yhe mechanism that cause mantle plumes to rise from mid-ocean ridges and then carry the overlying crust with them. Ill bet Carolina Supply has a model tank with a single point heating element that creates actual mantle plume geometry, like a big"fish bowl" sized "lava lamp"

I too always like to show little demonstrations of a concept because Plate Tectonics despite being well evidenced in the "detection sciences" is counter intuitive if you cant see a mechanism.

I had an activity with a candle or sterno heating the center of a big glass pot of oil. float rafts of styrofoam on them - convection currents. They'd come apart at the oceanic rift (center of the bowl) and hit the continents (sides of the bowl). I haven't tried it. Would like to know if crumbs of styrofoam would be small enough to get caught up in the currents to show the cells. Maybe another material like glitter?

glitter is a commonly used tool for showing currents in motion but a larger scales. I dont know how itd work in a small convection cell. Maybe some tiny chunks of "Pearlessence" Thats a teeny version of a glitter powder they use for embossing in crafts. Think scale, the smaller scale you make the experiment, the smaller the particles youll need for your model.