Tectonic Plates

This is a visual aid I created to help my year 7-8 students understand the different movements of the tectonic plates, during third year placement at Kaiapoi North School.

I am a very visual person so create and use a lot visual aids during my teaching of lessons. Knowing that my learners all learn in different ways, I like to provide visual aids along side verbal information where ever I can. For this lesson particular I presented the information verbally, visually and through actions. We created actions with our hands to build our understanding of how the different plate move. Creating actions for information helps students to remember because they have something to link with the information without needing materials.

While helping out in a science class during my time being a youth worker at Rangiora High School, the science teacher demonstrated how mountains are formed through the movement of convergent plates by pushing stacked towels together. The different layers of the towels showed how the layers of earth move and form the mountains. I really liked this idea so used it as part of my lesson, this also provided an activity the students could do themselves. The following video shows how you can do this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuihuIGnsuE