Volcanoes and Landmarks

As part of our Extreme Earth topic, primary six have been learning about Volcanoes. Throughout our lessons, we have had the opportunity to explore a variety of famous volcanoes and delve into their statistics, such as their heights. To help us grasp these measurements more concretely, we decided to compare the heights of these volcanoes against well-known landmarks and buildings, both locally and from afar. As a class, we collaboratively created a list of ten landmarks that we wished to investigate further.
Our first task involved ranking these landmarks from tallest to shortest, which provided great excitement and teamwork within the class. Each group had had a great time reaching their final order, with some friendly debates that even required a few rounds of ‘rock, paper, scissors’ to come to a final agreement! After compiling the rankings from each group, we discussed the similarities and differences, enhancing our collaborative skills and critical thinking.
Then, to deepen our understanding, we partnered up to research each landmark's actual height in metres. A special thanks goes to Mrs Carmichael, who navigated the official Larne channels to find out the height of Inver Park for us! The enthusiasm was palpable, as some of the boys and girls contemplated a field trip armed with measuring tapes to determine the height of the stadium themselves.
Once we had all the heights, we worked with our Busy Buddy and created tables on the computer to display this valuable information clearly. This culminated in an engaging activity where the boys and girls calculated how many of their own heights would equal each landmark’s height. With the use of calculators we applied our knowledge of rounding decimals to the nearest whole number in the process. Finally, we compared the heights of our chosen landmarks with those of some renowned volcanoes. It was a delightful lesson filled with lots of cross-curricular links.