Earth Share/Embed

To kick off this lesson, ask your students if they want to be lava surfers. You might get some puzzled looks, but whether they want to or not, we’re all lava surfers! You can share this article with them or read passages aloud to get them thinking about plate tectonics.

This activity is a bit of a challenge in terms of showing student work. Once your students complete their matching exercise, you can do one of two things: 1) Have them use the snipping tool and snip their answers to turn them into your LMS as an image; or 2) share the answer key so students can check their work. The Google Slide activity does not “lock” results once students move the images the way some other matching edtech tools might.

The plate tectonics activity aligns with Standard 3 of the National Geography Standards (NGS) and helps students analyze spatial concepts such as dispersion and distribution. Explore Big History’s geography resources and see how each activity aligns to the NGS in this alignment and placement doc.

Did you know that there’s an easy way to give students feedback on their claim-testing skills? The Claim Testing: Feedback Form breaks down the elements so you can assess how well they did crafting a claim and a counterclaim and if their responses are historically accurate. You can adapt the feedback form to focus only on the skills that are assessed by crossing out sections of the form that don’t apply to a particular activity. 

Informal writing routines like the Unit Notebook are incorporated in each unit of the course. These routines are part of how students learn the content and help them make connections to core Big History concepts. Learn more about writing routines on pages 3–4 of our Writing Guide. 

We know that writing a full DBQ essay might be challenging for middle-school students. This optional assessment can be adapted in a few ways: 1) Have students focus on the prewriting exercise, modeling how to unpack the prompt and write a claim. You can use the table on page 2 of the Claim Warm-Up activity to help students parse the prompt and craft their claim. 2) Create learning stations for student groups to examine a smaller selection of the DBQ sources and decide how each source helps to answer the prompt. 3) Shorten the essay in the writing activity to a paragraph or have students create a different product such as a Google Slide or infographic.

This writing assignment is available through Khan Academy’s Writing Coach, an AI-powered tool that guides students through the writing process and provides feedback—without doing the thinking or writing for them. Learn more and find a direct link to this assignment in our Writing Coach Guide.