Popular guess the landform game and STEM project for 2nd Grade
We started our landforms unit this week in 2nd grade homeschool (thanks, Covid!). Our Guess The Landform game was super easy to prep for and my 2nd grader LOVED it and begged to play longer. Here’s how to play Guess My Landform!
What You’ll Need
I wasn’t kidding when I said this game is VERY low prep. All you HAVE to have is play-doh. We also used our landform vocab cards, definitions and photo cards to play as well. (NOTE: the landform definition and photo cards are small because I printed them two to a page to save ink and the scale was perfect for the homeschool or small group setting.)
Here’s the official list of materials we used…
- Play-Doh (one per set of partners)
- landform vocabulary photo cards, definition cards and name cards
- timer (this one is perfect for my slow paced perfectionist and I use it all day every day for allllll the things!)
guess the landform game rules
The first thing we did was review our landform names and definitions. I laid out the landform photo cards and gave Cooper the definition cards. He read the definition of a landform to me and then laid the definition card on top of the correct landform photo card and we quickly reviewed each landform type as he matched the cards.
This would be super easy to do whole group before you play the game as your mini lesson. Just post all the photo cards in a pocket chart and read one definition card at a time and ask kids to match them.
And the photo cards are all on one page in the landforms unit, so it would be easy to go digital with this review! Just pull up the one page of photos on your interactive board and then read aloud a definition. Then, ask kids to name the landform using the photo cards to help.
After we reviewed, we were ready to play our Guess the Landform game. I laid out the definition cards. Cooper chose a landform to create. He didn’t remove the card. We left all of them on display so I wouldn’t know which landform he was creating.
I set the timer for 2 minutes. During that 2 minutes, he was expected to decide the landform he would make, and finish building it. The timer was simply to keep us on track. You could use this in the classroom by setting a whole group timer, or if you feel like your kids can self-regulate, they could play on their own without a class timer. My sweetheart can take extra long doing things so we have been wearing our timer out to build up his time management skills! 🙂
Once he finished building the landform (before the time was up…yay!), it was my turn to guess what landform he made. During the guesses, we had to tell what landform it was and use the definition to justify our answer. Cooper made a volcano first.
So, when I made my guess, we used the sentence frame, “It is a volcano because it looks like a mountain, but opens up at the top.”
And that’s it! On the next turn, I built another landform and he had to guess using the sentence frame we made. We took turns making and guessing the landforms for several rounds. It’s really that simply. And engaging! Because, who doesn’t love to play with play-doh??
Building landforms with play-doh is a great lead in to our Build an Island STEM challenge we do later in this landforms unit!
This Guess the Landform game, the definition cards, and the landform photo cards can be found with this complete, Next Gen aligned landforms 2nd grade science unit.
