How to make learning geographic landforms fun and meaningful

For my student teaching I was in a 7th grade inner-city geography class. I taught 3 sections of Introduction to physical geography in which each student was required to understand the physical world around them and how we as people fit into it.

Most of the students were burnt our by the time they got to me, so looking to find creative ways to teach landforms and bodies of water was essential. Because if they didn’t learn that, then the rest of our semester was a moot point.

Therefore, we built maps, recreated bodies of water, and used a hands-on approach to make sure every child was well-familiarized with each land and water form. But the absolute easiest way to start learning basic geographic terms is through 3-part puzzles, our favorite being Landform Match-ups!

Using Landforms Match-ups to meet Elementary and Middle school Learning objectives

Identify and describe several common landforms

This can be those indicated within the game or other. Have students go through all landforms and even have the work on classifying them [let students choose their own ways to classify to see what they come up with]. This could include how big they are or ordering them from largest to smallest. Maybe grouping them based on land vs. water or other.

Locate landforms learned on a map

By pulling out a local, state, country, or even world map, kids can immediately start identifying the landforms they’re learning. For instance, Florida is the most obvious and easiest peninsula to teach!

Compare and contrast similar landforms or bodies of water

Whether written or verbally, kids should be able to differentiate between two like landforms without directly reading definitions. For instance have them compare and contrast peninsula vs. isthmus or even less obvious comparisons like strait vs. isthmus.

Geography Landform Puzzle Game

In the box are 15 different landforms and bodies of water, so it’s not exhaustive in terms of what students can learn. However, the nice aspect is that kids can actually think to identify other landforms not covered and define them both on their own and by doing research [this allows for some critical thinking and teaches them to use educational reference materials, therefore covering a few more learning objectives.

Each puzzle is three pieces and has a picture, name of geographic topic, and definition.

It is self correcting in that each hole and and puzzle knob is a different size, shape, and orientation so that only the right term and definition fit with its picture.

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