Stress and Faulting Lab

Last week, we started our Earthquakes unit in 6th grade science.  We always start this unit talking about stress and faulting, and relate this to what we have already learned about the types of boundaries in our Plate Tectonics Unit.  For the past few days, students have been working on a Stress and Faulting Lab.  I have been doing this lab with students for the past few years, and it has been very successful (minus many students "playing" with the clay).  It gives students a great visual of each type of stress on Earth's Crust, and the types of faults and plate boundaries associated with each stress.

Students worked in small groups (2-3 students) to complete THIS LAB SHEET.  Additionally, each group needs clay (play doh will also work)  and 2-3 wooden blocks (shown below).

 The picture below show student drawings which represent compression and tension on the crust.  The drawings are based off of their clay models which is why the Before Picture is shown as a "ball".

 This picture shows students using clay as a model to represent Shearing.

At the end of the lab, students are challenged to model how mountains and valleys form using the wooden blocks.  They use three blocks for this, as shown below.

Typically, this lab takes 2, 42 minute periods to complete.  However, Old Man Winter caused this to take three days due to school delays and late buses.  Despite this, I feel that students learned from the lab and are now able to visualize stress, faulting and boundaries while also making connections between the three.