Students can build a layered, three-dimensional booklet to demonstrate their understanding of landforms. Start with mountains cut from brown construction paper. This is the back page of the book. Next, have them cut smaller hills from green paper. On top of the hills is blue paper cut to represent a lake or river, and another layer of green to stand in for plains. Staple the pages together on their left sides. Students can write facts about each landform on the page that represents it.
Have students completely clean off their desks, then let them get messy with a fun landform activity. Squirt a pile of white shaving cream in the center of each desk. Students can use their fingers and utensils like pencils or plastic spoons to turn the shaving cream into a land form, such as a mountain or island. When they're done, give them some blue shaving gel and let them turn it into water around or on the landform. The best part is that the shaving cream will make the desks sparkle during cleanup.
Water may not seem like a particularly damaging substance to your students. After all, they bathe in it all the time. But a simple experiment will demonstrate how, over time, water can wear away even mighty mountains. Give each student a sugar cube on a paper plate, a small cup of water and an eye dropper. Instruct them to drop water around the sugar cube, but not directly on it. The cube represents a mountain. They'll be able to see how water seeps into the space between particles and weathers away these huge land forms.
A simple salt clay, made of two cups of flour, one cup of salt, one-half cup of water and one-quarter teaspoon of vegetable oil, may be dyed with food coloring and used by your students to form their own landforms. The clay is easy enough for your students to make up themselves during class and mold into mountains, hills, islands and other landforms. Let the sculptures dry and let students paint them, then design their own people and cultures that might live on the landform.