Sidney Jones
Digital Portfolio
Plate Tectonics
Science
The idea of plate tectonics was new to me, I had never even heard of plate tectonics before the 8th grade. Plate tectonics is the science where you learn about features across the earth in different locations on earth. You also learn about the earth’s plates and the different layers of the earth. Even though I don’t think plate tectonics is my strong suit, I am better at the subject than I was at the beginning of the year. The purpose of this reflection is to express how I grew in this topic in the 8th grade school year. This year I developed my knowledge of plate tectonics.
We learned plate tectonics because in groups of two we created a model of a location on earth to help students understand plate tectonics. For the students to understand we had to learn the content first. We learned about earth features and processes, how we know what location is what type of location (how Great Rift Valley is continent-continent divergent)
Lots of students are visual learners, most models are very expensive and we can’t just visit the earth’s crust, core, and mantle. So we created the model to give students a better learning experience. We started learning all of the general content like earth features and processes, Pangea, theories about earth and the history of the earth. We later learned about our individual location, the process and features there and where it is located. Our model location is Great Rift Valley which is located in Africa and sits on the African plate, which will eventually be the Somalian and Nubian plates. There are volcanoes in Great Rift Valley and volcanoes require the mantle to be heated. The mantle is a part of the earth that is right under the crust and is made of a fluid lava. The crust at Great Rift Valley is continental crust which is thick and less dense. The crust itself is a layer before you reach the magma. After the mantle there is the inner core and outer core. The inner heats up the mantle for there to be potential lava. The outer core is just outside of the inner core and is more liquid than the mantle.
The content growth recorder showed the most growth for me in plate tectonics content. The content growth recorder is when we will out information at the beginning of the unit to see how much we know before we start. Then we fill it out during the unit and after the unit to see how much we learned. The content growth recorder was made for portfolios. You can see in my beginning color blue I was very vague and wasn’t sure about the content which is why I didn’t answer some of the questions. Then in my final color black you can see my answers were in more detail and I knew all of the answers to each question. As an example in the beginning as a guess I put that a rift valley in a valley full of mountains. I put this because at the time I wasn’t aware of what rifting was. At the end I said a rift valley is a valley that is Rifting/Stretching and Thinning.
In one of our quizzes in the plate tectonics unit, we had to know about convection and mantle convection because on everyone’s model convection had to be shown. Everyone also had to write a paragraph about convection in their model explanation. We started by revisiting what convection is because we had previously learned what it is in 7th grade. Convection is the process of when something heated becomes less dense and rises. Then it cools becomes more dense and sinks. Then we talked about if this process could happen in the earth it can and it is called mantle convection. Mantle convection is the when heated rock becomes less dense and rises. Then becomes denser and sinks. The rock is heated by the core and the mantle convection produces convection currents. Convection currents basically are the rock rising and sinking. When you look at convection currants in a model they are usually shown as curving arrows. Without all of this knowledge about convection my model explanation paragraph would have failed.
This year I bettered my knowledge of convection and how it can happen in the earth. I knew what convection was because of the 7th grade, but I had no idea convection also happens in the mantle. I also found out there are two types of crust, continental (which is in Great Rift Valley) and oceanic. Continental is thick and less dense and oceanic is thinner and denser.
This is the book we used for the Plate Tectonics unit.
This is a chart comparing convection in water and mantle convection..
The knowledge of plate tectonics may help me in the future because I might consider being an earth scientist as a career because science is one of my favorite subjects. I might also take a more complicated version of earth science in a higher grade. Even though plate tectonics isn’t my strong suit it may be good that I had exposure to it now so I won’t be clueless about it in the future.