Roller coasters and cross-curricular learning

I think Science is a great way to go cross-curricular. It's automatically hands-on and what 6-7 year old doesn't LOVE science?!  Over the last few weeks we've been learning about balance and motion. This week and last especially we've been diving into rolling motion, specifically roller coasters. This is a great book:

The pictures are super cute and so full of richness that adds to the dimension of the story. There's also some great videos on youtube of how and what to teach using this story. You can find one here.

We are also planning our own amusement park in groups of 3. First we looked at some videos of roller coasters made on a Go camera that make it seem like you're on the roller coaster. A virtual field trip! Then we brainstormed some things you need to make an amusement park. After that we broke into groups and decided where we would put our parks. It was a great way to teach maps, too! We used this one:

Locations of US Amusement Parks

 

We divided the maps into N,S,E,W and then further into NW,SW,NE, and SE. We discussed which parts had the least and greatest amount of amusement parks, and the weather and landforms in each region. This led to discussions on cities vs. states, population, and the Midwest region.

 

Here we are choosing the region and state we want to plant our amusement park in:

This is my new phone!!! A Galaxy 5S!! What's with the blurriness? I thought it would be a good one!

Tomorrow we start planning and drawing the maps of the parks. I'll let you know how they turn out. So far, it's been some pretty engaged learning!  

[Glitterfy.com - *Glitter Words*]