Online Activities: Earth System Cards

(go to the Flash online game)

Grade Level K-4

Essential Question How are things divided among Earth's four spheres?

Objective Students will use their knowledge of Earth's four major spheres—land, water, living things, and air—to classify information. They will also make connections among the spheres.

Approach Present the students with the following: Everything on Earth belongs to one of four spheres. Earth's spheres are land, water, living things, and air.

Online, students are presented with a stack of cards. Each card is labeled with a word or picture that represents something from one of Earth's spheres. Instruct the students to sort the cards into four piles. One pile is land, one is water, one is living things, and one is air. Students should click on the top card in the stack and drag it to the sphere pile it belongs to. If they are correct, the card will stay there. If they are incorrect, the card will move to the discard pile.

Reflection To make the connection between the Earth System Cards game and the Earth system in which they live, ask students to think about what they've done today. What did they do when they got out of bed? What happened on the way to school? Have they played outside?

Then ask students to describe things in each of the four spheres that they saw, heard or felt. For example, they might have seen a bird in the sky. The bird would be a living thing. The sky it was flying through would be the air.

Students can either tell the story of their living thing or write a short summary of their ideas on the back of the paper.

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