Mentor Monday - Landform booklet

Something we do in Fourth Grade every year is sneak in a little geography. There are several terms that the students are responsible for knowing. But with all the other content we need to cover, it's hard to get this little unit in. We usually slide it into the other content areas. Take our unit on Native Americans, for example. We study the Inuit, Kwakiutl, Nez Perce, Hopi, Pawnee, and Seminole. As we are discussing each of these we can talk about the locations they chose to live and the landforms that surround that area.

I'll go through the Kwakiutl for you, since its such a fun word to say. They settled on the Pacific coast in the Washington - Oregon areas. I can cover oceans, continents, coast, gulf, and bay throughout my discussion of this tribe. When I mention one of the landforms I have them pull out this little booklet that we handed out at the beginning of the year. It's just 3 regular pieces of 8.5x11 paper that have been folded width-wise and stapled to form a book.

Each page can fit up to two different landform definitions and pictures. Since it's the beginning of the year I have printed out the text to glue down, but I want them to draw the pictures to get a clearer sense of what the landform shapes look like. I've had them copying from the board everything including the text, but they took 4-EVA to get it done. I want to see if this helps them get it done faster. Any extra text pieces they can slip into their binder baggie I talked about here.

When I need them busy for a bit while I conduct the reading records we are charged with every year, I will run all of the pictures they need to know into a powerpoint presentation that I have running on a loop with a slide separation of 7 minutes for now to see if this is enough time for them to draw and stay on task. That's 27 students that I need to sit and listen to read complete books while I take notes. So I need the others to stay busy with something. This is a great project for them to complete individually.

I have placed the ppt and the text printout into my TpT store for free. So make sure you take advantage of that. I'd LOVE it if you leave me a little comment there on how it works for you.

Have fun!