Homeschool Science Lesson: Teaching Mountain Formation

This lesson fits into the subject category of Earth Science. This homeschool science lesson guide is designed to assist the homeschool family teach and learn subject matter pertaining to mountains and how they are formed. This homeschool science lesson guide is written to be most useful to the homeschool family with students currently working in elementary and middle grade level science material. If your homeschool student is ready to cover the topic of mountains and how they are made, use this homeschool science lesson guide to assist them in gaining a basic understanding of these topics.

How are mountains formed? Help your homeschool student to understand that different mountains have been formed in different ways. Explain to your student that mountains can be formed by tectonic plates colliding, volcanic activity, magma from earth's mantle layer, or erosion.

Plate tectonics: Discuss plate tectonics with your homeschool student. Explain that put simply, tectonics means the motions, folding, and faulting of the earth's plates. You can help your student to understand how plate tectonics results in the creations of mountains by explaining that sometimes the plates crash together. When they do this, rock is squeezed, lifted up, and pushed around. This results in a mountain being formed. Inside the mountain, the layers of rock fold and crack.

Volcanoes: When two tectonic plates that lie underneath the ocean floor collide, a mountain is still formed; it's just that the mountain is under the water. However, sometimes the force is so great that the rock gets pushed up high enough to break the surface of the water. When ocean plates collide, one plate has sunk beneath the other. That means that one plate is pushed into the hot mantle layer of the earth. The mantle above the sunken plate melts and volcanoes erupt because this collision leaves cracks and weak spots in the crust. Magma from underneath the earth's crust is now able to seep up through the cracks. When the magma breaks the surface, it is called lava. As the lava cools, it hardens into rock, forming another type of mountain that we all know as a volcano.