How to DIY Layers of the Earth

Continuing from our Science and Geography Unit of

• How the universe all began
• How Earth was created and life on Earth
• The Sun and Moon
• Our Solar System
• More about Earth
• The Seven Continents
• My Place in the World
• Land and Water forms
• Biomes
• Layers of the Earth

This week we are learning about the layers of the Earth. We started off with a paper craft and using Plasticine to introduce the layers of the Earth. I instructed my DD5 to roll a small ball of red Plasticine and then get a yellow colour of Plasticine to flatten out and wrap around the red ball smoothing the orange Plasticine into a bigger ball and repeat with yellow Plasticine then the final blue and green Plasticine that will represent the layer of the Earth that we see and know. DD5 had a nice sized ball that represented Earth. Now, for the exciting bit, I wanted to demonstrate to her that Earth is a rocky planet and scientists believe or have guessed the Earth is made up of layers and the very surface of Earth that we see, of soil, rocks and water is the very thinnest layer. I instructed her to carefully cut down the middle of her Earth model to see what it would reveal, although we didn't get a perfect model because she had fiddled and rolled the colours too much that they merged into one another, her cousins model displayed it very well for us all the understand the layers of Earth. Though this activity was an excellent way to get your point across and they love to use their hands.

The next craft was a paper pop up craft that DD will add to her science and geography book. Here you will need

1. 6 pieces of coloured paper; brown, pale yellow, bright yellow, orange and red and green.
2. 5 circles of varying sizes or use a compass
3. Glue stick and a pair of scissors
4. Hole puncher and labels
5. White card

Method

1. Beginning with the brown paper instruct your child to draw out a semi circle by positioning the largest circle over the edge of the paper, so half the circle is under paper and half is not. The brown paper will be your crust layer
2. Do this with all the different colours of paper using the appropriate sizes the largest being the crust and the smallest being the inner core.
• Brown paper = Crust layer 
• Pale yellow paper = upper mantle
• Bright Yellow paper = lower mantle
• Orange paper = outer core
• Red paper = inner core
3. Then with your white card fold in half and open up, use this fold line as your guide to glue down your semi circles. Beginning with the Brown Crust fold in half and snip 1cm from the straight edge and make folds to stick onto the white card. An important tip is that for the papers to fold down you will need to glue the papers at a slight angle, so like a wide arrow pointing down. Do this with all the layers in the right order And glue them down so that the fold of the layers match to the middle fold of the white card. This will be the pop up of your card.
4. For the Earth make the layers of the varying sizes with the left over brown, pale yellow, bright yellow, orange and red and glue them on top of another. Now, cut out the blue paper to the same size of the brown circle and add green cut outs of paper to represent the land. Fold them both in half and glue back to back each of the halves, which makes a page of a book and glue the back to the bottom of the card.
5. Lastly, on the other empty space on the whit card, we should put a key label for identification, use a hole puncher to punch out holes on the left over paper and write out the labels.

I hope you enjoyed this tutorial for inspiration. Subscribe for more DIYs and comment below of what you would like to see next.