All good things must come to an end- today I’m sharing the last of my free documents for digital notebooks from our geology unit. Check out the previous posts for more free stuff on scientific inquiry, ecology, and chemistry. To learn more about why I use digital notebooks and how to set them up, check out my digital notebook page here.
Geology Unit
This 6th grade geology teaches students how geological forces shape and change our Earth, including the basics of plate tectonics and the rock cycle. Also included in this unit is a mini-unit Engineering for Earthquakes that teaches students critical thinking skills and the engineering design process. It’s a big unit, so I’ve divided the documents into 3 sections: plate tectonics stuff, rock cycle stuff, and engineering for earthquakes stuff.
We teach this unit at the end of 6th grade because it is probably the most challenging conceptually for students- most of geologic process are on a vast scale of time and scope, and go unnoticed in everyday life. To make the concepts clearer, this unit involves a lot of modeling- both using models and making models- which help students to better visualize the gradual and unseen changes. Credit for the geology unit activities goes to Rice University, the US Geological Survey, YouTube teacher Michael Sammartano, my former teaching partner Melacyn Turner, our tech integrator Chet Garber, and also my brother Ross (who’s a practicing geologist).
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My name is Nick Mitchell, and I love the art and science of teaching.
The Scientific Teacher 