Look for: The land cracks apart or breaks open

Look for students to explain using words and/or pictures that when there is an earthquake, the land at and below the surface can be affected. Some ways it can be affected include:

• The land cracks apart or breaks open.
• The land shifts in elevation with part of the land increasing and/or decreasing in elevation.
• The land moves horizontally to be in a different location .
• The bedrock below the surface is also cracked or broken.
• The long breaks in the bedrock are called fault lines.
• The large sections or chunks of bedrock in between these fault lines are called plates.

Use this Progress Tracker entry as a formative assessment to see what students are able to synthesize from this lesson. If students struggle to get started answering this, encourage them to look back over the profile models that have been developed over the last two class periods, and use them to answer this question.

It is important that what the students write in the two-column tracker reflects their own thinking at that particular moment in time. This is an opportunity for students to express their understanding and reasoning in their own way. Encourage students to express what they’ve learned using a mode that makes sense for them. For some emergent multilingual students, encourage them to use this space to make sense in the language that they feel most comfortable using. The individual Progress Tracker is a space for students to be creative and to synthesize learning in their own words. It is not supposed to follow a prescriptive plan or structure and should be a low-stakes opportunity for students’ to make sense of what they are learning without the worry and anxiety that comes with knowing their work will be graded. Use the Progress Tracker for formative assessment only.