Second Grade

Creating Island Landforms

by Anderson

Background

Second graders have become experts on all different landforms, including mountains, hills, volcanoes, plateaus, deltas, plains, and more. During this lesson, they used their knowledge to design and create their own model island out of dough.

Question to Explore

How can we use our knowledge of various landforms to design and create our own model island?

Materials (per student)

  • dough (2 cups flour, 1 cup salt, 1/2 – 1 cup water)
  • Pre-made landform flags (Type and print out in triangle shapes, cut and glue onto toothpicks)
  • paper plate
  • Acrylic paint (blue, white, brown, green, red, yellow, orange, black)
  • Paint palette
  • Paintbrush

Procedure

  1. First, students drew a model of their island.  They included at least 5 different landforms in their drawing.
  2. Next, students created the dough with their parents at home and brought it to school. (2 cups flour, 1 cup salt, 1/2 – 1 cup water)
  3. Using the dough, students began creating their islands on a paper plate, differentiating between each landform.  They poked the pre-made landform flag labels into the dough while it was still wet.
  4. Then, we waited a week for the islands to dry.
  5. Lastly, we painted the islands.