Divide your class into groups and have them pretend to be geographers. Hand out magazines with pictures of and articles about landforms, such as National Geographic. Have your class look through these to see how many landforms they can identify in the pictures. They might see rivers, lakes, mountains, caves, plateaus, coastlines and many more. Let them look up the definitions of the landforms in dictionaries and encyclopedias. See which group can find the most landforms and have each group present what they learned to the class.
Rivers flow throughout the world and many rivers have long histories that have affected multiple civilizations throughout the centuries. Rivers start at sources like snow melts or springs and flow into larger bodies of water like lakes, oceans and seas. The area where a river runs into a sea or ocean is called an estuary. In estuaries, the fresh water of the river meets the salt water of the ocean or sea. Make a list of rivers and a list of countries and see if your class can match the river with the country it flows through.
Teach your class about the important roles that landforms have played in the history of navigation by telling them about the ways that pioneers on the Oregon Trail navigated in the nineteenth century. Divide the class into groups and let them choose a landform from a list of those that pioneers navigated. These can include formations like the Missouri River, Scotts Bluff, Chimney Rock and the Sweetwater River. Groups should draw pictures of these landforms so that the class can put together its own Oregon Trail by posting the landforms around the classroom.
Make a mini golf course in your classroom using landforms. Try creating mountains with tunnels in them out of play-doh or paper mache. Create mini deserts with sand and make channels for rivers by cutting toilet paper rolls in half, covering them with aluminum foil and taping them together. Once you've finished, you can play landform mini golf with your class. This project may take some time to set up so have your class plan out their course before they begin creating it.