07 Glaciers
👩🏫 Teacher’s Guide
Objective
Students will describe how glaciers form, move, and reshape the land with moraines and basins.
Vocabulary
glacier, pressure, advance, retreat, debris, moraine, basin, massive
Teaching Notes
- Start with a quick demo or model to visualize the concept.
- Pre-teach key vocabulary with gestures or sketches.
- Prompt students to predict, observe, and explain in full sentences.
- Check for understanding using either/or and short-answer prompts.
🧒 Student Worksheet
Concept and Helping Material
Definition. Glaciers advance and retreat, carrying debris that forms moraines and scooping basins that may fill as lakes.
Helping ideas and samples:
- Try a quick sort, draw-and-label, or compare-and-contrast.
- Name one place you see this idea at home or at school.
- Safety: follow teacher directions and handle materials carefully.
Vocabulary and Definition
- — a slow-moving mass of ice
- — force from weight that compacts snow into ice
- — to move forward
- — to move backward
- — rock pieces carried by ice
- — ridge of rock/soil left by a glacier
- — large hollow that can hold water
- — very large
Words to Learn
, , , , , , ,
Sentences to Fill In
1. Snow turns into ice under .
2. A glacier moves downhill when it .
3. When melting outpaces growth, a glacier .
4. Ridges of dropped rock are called .
5. Hollows carved by ice are called .
Hands-On Experiment or Activities
What You Need: simple classroom items.
What You Do: Sandy-ice glacier: freeze sand in ice cubes, rub on foil, then melt in a tray to see scraping and deposited debris.
Think and Talk: What changed? What stayed the same?
Reflection
- Why does glacier movement reshape valleys into U-shapes?
- Which places today still have massive glaciers?