Volcanoes: Good Grief!

During my teaching practice as part of my teacher training (a long time ago now!), I designed my first creative teaching and learning activity:

To illustrate the life cycle of a volcano, students had to draw simple cartoons to represent active, dormant an extinct volcanoes. It was always a favourite with my Geography students, even with my older learners! 

It was simple — and, definitely took indirect inspiration from other sources — but was lots of fun and very effective!

Over the years, this activity has evolved:

• Students would use their cartoons to create comic strips to tell the story.
• When our iPad programme began, we also used emoji to represent the different stages. 
• When Apple Pencil and the Logitech Crayon became compatible with the base model iPad (6th Gen - 2018), some students drew their volcanoes on iPad using Keynote, Notes or Sketches School. 
• Students recreated their drawings using shapes in Keynote, and then animated their volcanoes — which was particularly effective with an active volcano! 

My latest evolution of this activity was based on the awesome ‘Today at Apple, At Home” video:

Students created Peanuts-style cartoon drawings of the 3 stages of a volcano’s life cycle.

Learning Objectives for this lesson:

• Understand the stages in the life cycle of a volcano.
• Identify key characteristics of a volcano at each stage.
• Create Peanuts-style cartoon drawings of the 3 stages of a volcano’s life cycle.

 Students demonstrated their learning by drawing volcanoes in the style of Peanuts / The Snoopy Show to illustrate the stages in the life cycle of a volcano — active, dormant and extinct.

They used either Pages, Keynote or Sketches School using Apple Pencil, Logitech Crayon or their finger to draw.

They added headings, definitions, key words and examples below their drawings.  

This lesson formed part of my Apple Teacher Portfolio as an ‘Explore’ lesson, but could be easily adapted and used as an ‘’Activate’ or ‘Apply’ lesson depending on the age, skill level, positioning of the activity, and has lots of opportunities for extension activities. 

I used this lesson with my 1st Year Geography class (12-13 years old), but it could easily be used in different contexts with other age groups too!