👩‍🏫 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?