Tectonic plates with crackers: edible geology lesson
Use crackers and frosting to model convergent, divergent and sliding plates in 20 minutes.
Materials and tasty setup
You need 4 square crackers, 5 spoons of white frosting, a plastic knife, paper plates and wet wipes. Spread a thick 5 millimeter layer of frosting on the paper plate, it stands for the soft hot mantle that moves plates.
Break one cracker in two halves and place both pieces on the frosting with a 1 centimeter gap. The frosting is the mantle and the hard crackers are rigid lithosphere plates that float, collide and slide in real Earth.
Push, pull and slide plates
Push the two pieces slowly together to model convergent boundary and watch frosting pile into mountains. Then pull them apart to model divergent boundary where fresh frosting rises like new crust in the Atlantic rift valley.
Slide one piece forward and the other backward to model transform boundary like the San Andreas fault in California. After 20 minutes of tests, draw each result in a notebook and then happily eat your geology models.
- Push together makes mountains
- Pull apart makes rift valley
- Slide sideways makes fault line
- Frosting equals hot mantle
- Eat models after drawing