In this four-week unit, young students learn some basic aspects of how our Earth works. The Street Beneath My Feet by Charlotte Guillian and Yoval Zommer starts this unit off. This double-sided foldout book shows a journey down through the layers of the Earth, all the way to the planet’s core and out the other side. One side of the foldout shows the ground beneath the city, while the reverse side shows the ground beneath the countryside. The story follows a boy walking down a noisy city street, his red sneakers pounding the pavement, and he wonders, "What's going on deep in the ground?" This overview of basic earth science provides an interesting and clear visual for Kindergarteners to begin asking questions about what it is like to be a geologist. Throughout this curriculum unit students will conduct exploratory investigations to learn how geologists discover through science things they cannot see, and they will build models showing the surface of the Earth with the layers that lie beneath.
(Developed for Science, grade K; recommended for Science, grades K-2)
