Part of the Hoosier History & Indiana State Parks Elementary School Curriculum Series
Key objectives
Students will understand how glacial ice and melting water shaped and reshaped the Earth’s land surface by eroding rocks and soil in some areas and depositing them in other areas in a process that extended over a long period, and will look at how the glaciers shaped two Indiana State Parks.
Featured state parks
Key resources
Activity 1: Time and Motion
During this lesson students will investigate how a glacier moves over time. Students will use a piece of paper and a pencil to make observations and relate what they see to the formation of a glacier. Activity length: 60 minutes.
- Background
The Ice Age started over one million years ago and ended in Indiana about 15,000 years ago. During colder Ice Age periods, the Earth’s temperature was lower, and there was a lot of snow. Snow piled up faster than it melted, getting deeper and deeper. As the snow piled up, its weight formed into a glacier of solid ice.
If you drop a clump of wet sand on a sidewalk, it spreads out. If you drop a second clump at the same spot, the first clump spreads out further. This is how glaciers moved. As snow continued to fall in the north, the weight pushed the edges of the glacier further south.
The Ice Age shaped Indiana’s landscape. Glaciers flattened hills, buried rivers, dug out new lakes and pushed piles of rocks into new hills called moraines. As the glaciers melted, large amounts of water carved the paths of Indiana’s rivers.
Today we see evidence of glaciers in Indiana, especially in northeastern Indiana. The many lakes, low hills and boulders in northeastern Indiana are signs of our most recent glaciers.
- Vocabulary, materials required, focus questions
Vocabulary
- Glacier: a large, flowing river of ice that moves very slowly
- Landscape: a section or expanse of scenery
- Moraines: a long hill of earth and stones carried and deposited by a glacier
- Deposited: to put or leave (someone or something) in a particular place
- Evidence: proof
- Boulders: a large rounded rock
Materials required
- Paper Glaciers: paper, pencils
- A Human Glacier: Handout - ID tags for glaciers (10-12), rocks (5-6) and debris (5-6)
Focus questions
- What is a glacier?
- How is a glacier formed and how does it move?
- How were natural features like the Ohio River and Lake Michigan formed by the presence of the glaciers?
- Step-by-step directions
Begin with a discussion of what glaciers are, when they were here and how the landscape might have looked during their advancement across portions of what is now Indiana. Use the focus questions and resource links identified. Use one or both of the activities below.
Paper Glaciers
- Ask students, individually or in groups, to fold a piece of paper inward about 1 inch on two sides, and then fold the paper in half. Stand the paper on a desk so the piece of paper looks like a tent.
- Have them place the pencil in front of the piece of paper. The paper represents a glacier; the pencil represents the land in front of the glacier.
- Press gently on the paper. This represents the pressure that was being applied by years of falling snow. Have the students record observations. Ask what happens to the pencil? Ask what direction the glacier moves.
- After recording observations, crumple the paper. Ask what effect might crumpling the paper might have on the glacier movement? Repeat the activity several times with the crumpled paper and record observations. Ask the students what way they think best demonstrates how a glacier moves and why. Note: The crumpled-paper approach better represents the way a glacier might move.
- Hold a discussion using these questions and others: What best represents how a glacier moves? Where is the pressure coming from on a glacier? What does the pencil represent?
A Human Glacier
- Move aside desks and tables in the room where possible.
- Ask 10 students to stand at one end of the classroom and lock elbows. This will represent part of a glacier. Give them ID tags. Ask the other students to scatter throughout the room. They will represent rocks and soil that is picked up by the glacier. Give them ID tags as well.
- Have the “glacier” move forward. As the glacier moves forward, it adds debris (students) to the glacier. (“Rocks” and “debris” lock their elbows to the glacier.)
- Stop the “glacier” and ask it to “retreat” to its original location. As the glacier begins to retreat, have the rocks and debris fall to the ground. Some may form a line where the glacier stopped; some may be dropped further along the retreat pathway.
- Experiment with varying speeds for movement of the glacier. Try having some students move faster than others. Try stopping the glacier after varying periods of time.
Lead a discussion about how this relates to Indiana. Not every student will be picked up by the glacier, depending how far across the room you allow the “glacier” to move. This represents parts of southern Indiana. The rocks and debris left behind can represent glacial gravel and erratics still found today
Activity 2: Left Behind: Glacial Parks in Indiana
This activity will introduce students to the locations of Indiana State Parks and to how glaciers impacted the landscape on which these DNR properties are located using maps and photos of glacial features in two Indiana State Parks. Activity length: 60 minutes.
- Background
Chain O’Lakes State Park and Pokagon State Park are located in northeast Indiana, where evidence of the glaciers that moved across the region can be seen. During an age when the climate was approximately 10 degrees cooler, more snow fell in the winter than melted in the summer. As an accumulation piled up over thousands of years, it formed an ice sheet that flowed from Canada over northern Indiana. The glacier that began melting 10,000 to 15,000 years ago was the last one of four to cover Indiana and has been named the Wisconsin glacier. The Saginaw lobe of this massive, one-mile thick, ice flow was the last of the “great forces” of Mother Nature to leave a lasting impression on the face of the lands of these two parks. Glacial features that can be seen include kettle hole lakes, kettle depressions, glacial kames, eskers and glacial erratics.
- Vocabulary, materials required, focus questions
Vocabulary
- Kettle hole lake: When blocks of ice broke away from the mass of a glacier and wedged into surrounding earth, they melted, and left behind small lakes.
- Kettle depression: Bodies of water and connecting wetlands formed by the gouging of earth, piling of surrounding debris, and the deposits of sand and stone.
- Glacial Kame: Kames were created where water from the melting glaciers ran across the glacier’s surface and into a large hole in the ice. The water carried sand and rocks, just as modern day rivers do today. When the ice around the holes melted large piles of sand and rock remained.
- Esker: A long winding ridge of stratified sand and gravel of peculiarly uniform shape that was deposited under a glacier.
- Erratics: Glacial boulders varying in size from a baseball to a small car that were left behind as glaciers receded.
Materials Required
- Online map: Glaciers/glacial periods in Indiana
- Online map: Locations of Indiana State Parks
- Handout: Glacial features at Chain O’Lakes State Park and Pokagon State Park
Focus Questions
- How were natural features like the Ohio River and Lake Michigan formed by the presence of the glaciers?
- Why do northern Indiana and southern Indiana have different natural features?
- What are some of the features that provide evidence that glaciers were here?
- Step-by-step directions
- Discuss with students the advance and retreat of glaciers in Indiana. Use this map as it identifies the general advance of the Wisconsin glaciation and match the location of each of Indiana’s state parks using the DNR web map. Which properties appear to be more or less impacted by the glaciers from what we know today?
- As a class, locate with latitude and longitude the locations of both Chain O’Lakes and Pokagon State Parks. Should these two parks exhibit evidence of glaciers in Indiana?
- Talk about several classic features that are evidence of a glacial past as identified in the vocabulary.
- Match the photos provided of glacial features at Chain O’Lakes and Pokagon state parks on the DNR webmap pdf with the feature names and descriptions provided.
- Locate these features on the property map for each park.Identify whether they are glacial erratic, kettle lake, glacial till,moraine, or something else.
Extension Ideas
- Take a field trip to Pokagon or Chain O’Lakes state park to learn about the impact of the glaciers in northeast Indiana.
- Take a field trip to Indiana Dunes State Park to learn about the impact of the glaciers on the formation of Lake Michigan.
Resources
