Layers of the Earth experiment

This year we are using The Good and the Beautiful’s Geology curriculum to support our learning journey. Since we are using the Montessori method during these Lower Elementary years, we are not committed to studying one area of science all school year. I felt comfortable introducing astronomy and geology this year, but he decided that astronomy wasn’t that interesting, so we added botany recently and chemistry. 

I’ve truly enjoyed studying geology to far because there is so much that I didn’t know, it’s amazing how much you can learn alongside your children.

We made our layers of the earth using homemade play dough. I decided to divide the work into 2 days. On the first day we made the play dough and then on Day 2 we created the earth and labeled the parts. I made the kids copies of the worksheet from the Good and Beautiful but they preferred to use Steph Hathaway’s Earth Chart for a reference. 

The best part of this project was cutting the Earth in half so they could see their layers, and I have to see that they both did an excellent job creating their Earth models. This is definitely something we would do again. We kept the models for about 2 weeks, before I tossed them, but these photos will serve as the memory of their work.