Landforms on Another Planet

LANDFORMS FROM ANOTHER PLANET

By: Student Bloggers Emma and Sadie

Last week, Team Gibbas students made topographic maps of landforms from an imaginary planet out of modeling clay, a ruler, dental floss, graph paper, and a pencil. Here is how they did it.

                                                                      

 LANDFORM PREPARING 

Before the students made the map, they had to choose a landform from the choices given. Then they had to make it out of clay. They had the option of making a mountain range, a volcano, an ocean trench, and ocean ridges. After they made the landform, they pushed a pencil through the middle of the top of the landform so they could line it up on the map. Then they measured 1 cm up from the bottom and marked it. Then they kept doing that until they got to the top. On the marks between each centimeter they took the dental floss held it tightly between their thumbs and sliced their landform  on the mark.

MAP MAKING

When the students were done slicing their landforms, they traced the slices from the top to the bottom on the paper. Then they created topographic maps from the tracings.  As a final step students were given a random map and they had to find the landform that the map was made for.