Day 3

Exploration: Modeling Earth’s Plate

Materials: a piece of orange, cutter, marker, toothpick
Procedures:
1. In the same group, with the use of a marker, draw a plate-like boundary on the
outer skin of the orange. (Different shapes of the boundaries would be better.)
2. Using a cutter, cut the boundaries that you make so that you will have a plate-
like model of the lithosphere.
(Note: Be careful when you use the cutter. You may ask the assistance of
someone who is older to do the cutting).
3. Peel off the skin of the orange following the outline that you have cut. The
fleshy fruit inside represents the mantle of the Earth.
4. Once you peel your orange, go to the other group and exchange your peeled
orange with their peeled orange.
5. Like puzzle pieces, try to reconstruct or put back together all the orange peels
so that they will become a whole orange once again.
6. Ask the other group to do the same with your orange.
7. While reconstructing the orange from the other group, write your observations
on the data sheet together with some illustrations.
Data Sheet

Observations Illustrations

Guide Questions:

Criteria: Content – 3 pts. Organization of Ideas – 2 pts. Total – 5 pts.

1. Using the orange peel, how many ways were you and your group able to fit the
orange peels together until you reached their final configuration?
2. Do you have a hard time identifying the right boundaries or the edge of the
orange peel?
3. What represents the orange peel?
4. How can you relate this activity to the hypothesis made by Alfred Wegener that
Earth’s continents were once part of one supercontinent?