Introducing Landforms

Friday 18 July 2014

I’ve been wanting to introduce this topic for the longest time but I couldn’t find the right timing. You see I don’t follow any curriculum. I based my lessons and activities on Mavi’s interest and he hasn’t shown any interest in landforms ever since. (We previously had Island and Lake in our lesson but that was it)

Now when we went to the mountain fun park last weekend, the view during our hour-long drive was breathtaking! We saw beautiful hills, lakes, meadows, rivers and waterfalls! Since then Mavi has been asking me a lot of questions about certain things like what’s the difference between rivers and streams? What is a bay? How does volcano loon like?

So after the trip I decided to create materials to discuss his concerns while his memories and excitement are still fresh.

Now first thing, the landform cards. You can get these for free from here. Aside from these, Mavi and I made another version using a blue cardstock and a brown paper bag. He enjoyed shaping the lands by tearing the brown paper instead of using scissors. In effect, the tearing was more appealing than having a straight cut. This is an enjoyable activity you can do with your little ones. They would love tearing the papers and at the same time talking about the landforms they’re making!

Can you see my little baby’s hand? He’s trying to reach out as I take a photo! Someone other than Mavi is interested in landforms as well!

The picture above is Mavi working on the cards. He’s matching them while memorizing the names of the landforms. Now this time, it’s not Vito’s hand appearing in the picture. It’s his foot! Now this baby is truly present in every activity of his big brother LOL.

Next, I have to show Mavi what does these landforms really looks like in the map. And the best material for this is the Philippine map wherein our home country is made of thousands of islands and rich in different landforms.

So as you can see below, we’re looking at the cards and search the actual landform in the map. We were able to identify a number of bays, islands, lakes… we spot an archipelago, isthmus, gulf and peninsula.

And the last activity we did was to create our very own landscape with landforms. What I did here was create a map using craft papers (blue and green), then laminate it. From there, we covered the green area with green playdough and identify the landforms present. I let Mavi add some details like his animal figures and Lego.

The laminated the craft paper so the dough won’t stick. wish we had a much bigger laminate so we can have a bigger landscape.