Use food to illustrate topics in geology.
Grasping the concepts of geology is often difficult without a model. Food can serve as an edible analogy to many aspects of the Earth encountered in geology. Incorporating food into the classroom will help students become more alert. Illustrating the topics will also help to clarify many points in the students' minds by allowing them to see, feel and taste the results.
Core Sampling
Show how the layers of the Earth are revealed through core sampling with sandwiches. Prepare several different types of sandwiches, each on a different type of bread. Try peanut butter and jelly on raisin bread, ham and cheese on rye, a BLT on wheat, grilled cheese on pumpernickel or club sandwiches on white toast. Explain to students that each of the ingredients represents a layer of minerals under the Earth's surface. Have the students press an apple corer through the sandwich to obtain the core sample. They should then gently push the sample out of the corer and draw a picture of the core on a piece of paper.The students should try to identify the layers based only on the core, if possible.
Strata Sandwich
Use a layer cake or stack of sliced bread to illustrate the changes in the strata of the Earth. Alternate thin slices of dark rye or pumpernickel bread with thin white bread slices to create a stack of four to six slices. Spread peanut butter or jelly between the slices to hold them together. The bread slices represent layers of different types of rock underground. Have the students observe what would happen if you turned the stack on its side or upside down, representing tectonic lift and tilt. Look at the layers when the edges of the stack are push inward to create a dome in the middle of the stack. This represents the mountains made when two continental plates collide. Gravity causes the layers to compress. Replicate this by pushing the stack down with your hand. Break off one end of the bread stack and move it sideways to show how the layers act when a fault line moves.
Cookie Mapping
Students can practice techniques used to create geologic maps of the surface of the Earth using a cookie. Opt for cookies with mixed-in solid ingredients, such as raisins, nuts, chocolate chips or candy-coated chocolates. The students should place a cookie on a flat surface and lay a transparency with a grid pattern marked on top of it. Ask them to draw the cookie onto a sheet of graphing paper by copying the portion of the cookie they see in each square under the transparency. By working one square at a time, the students will be able to replicate the cookie on the graph paper. Have the students color the graph paper cookie image, using different colors for the different ingredients. For instance, all the raisins in the cookie picture could be colored red and all the nuts could be green. The different ingredients represent different types of rock found in a landscape.
Plate Tectonics
Teach about plate tectonics using crackers, flat, chewy fruit snacks and peanut butter or cake frosting. Have the students spread a layer of peanut butter onto a paper plate to represent the magma in the asthenosphere, on which the Earth's tectonic plates float. Each student should place two squares of fruit snacks side-by-side on top of the peanut butter. These thin pieces of fruit snacks represent the thinner crust supporting the oceans. Tell them to observe what happens when the pieces of fruit snacks are pulled apart. The peanut butter which come up between the fruit snacks represents magma rising from beneath the Earth's surface. Replace one of the pieces of fruit snack with a cracker to represent the crust under the continents. What happens when the two pieces are pushed together and the cracker comes up over the fruit snack? The surface of the land (cracker) rises, forming a mountain chain. Use two crackers with the ends moistened in water. Place the crackers with their wet edges next to each other and observe what happens when they are pushed together and pulled apart.
Tags: peanut butter, fruit snacks, Have students, different types, happens when, observe what
