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• The Land Changes

Levels: 3-4
Contextual strands: Planet Earth and beyond

Synopsis

This topic has been chosen because the local landscape is readily available for children to study. The Land Changes provides opportunities for children to understand that the landscape is continuously changing, even though they may think it's the most constant aspect of all their surroundings.

This book has been designed to enable children, as they work through the activities, to acquire the basic concepts necessary to understand the more advanced concepts that are covered in other books in this series.

This topic has been designed to allow you to choose which context suits the level at which you will be working with your children. The appropriate context for level 1-2 is local in terms of time and space. Most activities can take place in the school grounds or local spaces and involve the near past. For children working at level 3-4, the context can be local, regional, national, and international and include places beyond planet Earth. At this higher level, the topic can extend into the more distant past.

Choose the context that is appropriate to the level your children are working at. If you are working with younger children, you may wish to bypass the more complex activities.

Concept overview

Use the concept overview, which is also on the inside front cover of the book, as a reference for the concepts that relate to The Land Changes: Keeping Earth's Systems in Balance to Sustain Life.

Read the concept overview (PDF 49 KB)

Links with other titles in the series

This book is aimed at levels 1–4. It should be undertaken before or in conjunction with any other books on the land and its changes, for example:

• Book 1: Waterways (L2–3, Planet Earth and Beyond)
• Book 2: Weathering and Erosion (L3–4, Planet Earth and Beyond)
• Book 6: Soil Animals (L3–4, Living World)
• Book 12: Volcanoes (L3–4, Planet Earth and Beyond)
• Book 21: Life between the Tides (L1–2, Living World)
• Book 22: Tidal Communities (L3–4, Living World)
• Book 40: Earthquakes (L3–4, Planet Earth and Beyond)
• Book 50: Storms (L3–4, Planet Earth and Beyond, Living World)

Other books that may provide useful background information for the activities (particularly those that involve recycling) include:

• Book 13: Aluminium (L3–4, Material World, Planet Earth and Beyond)
• Book 29: Solar Energy (L2–4, Physical World, Planet Earth and Beyond)
• Book 30: The Air around Us (L1–4, Physical World, Material World)
• Book 60: Rubbish (L1–2, Material World)
• Book 61: Recycling (L3–4, Material World)

Note: Books 29 and 30 are useful when considering changes to the atmosphere, but note that understanding invisible atmospheric change is relevant only to level 4.

Science Focus: Landforms, on pages 23–62 of Making Better Sense of Planet Earth and Beyond (Ministry of Education, 1999), includes useful information and activities for this topic.

Assessment resources

Search the science section of the Assessment Resource Banks (ARB) website to find resources that assess the 'big idea' learning outcomes referred to in the concept overview for this title.

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