Looking for an easy way to teach continental drift and edible plate tectonics? You will love this simple and tasty earth science demonstration using cake!
It’s super delicious and makes a fun science experiment for kids.
It’s the perfect addition to your creative STEM activities!
Kids will have so much fun making and then eating their own tectonic plates.
Make this edible tectonics lesson for your class or at home and kids will never forget this lesson!
There is no end to learning fun when cake is involved. And the chocolate cake looks just like dirt while the green frosting looks like grass! Science has never been so delicious!
Read on to see how to make this edible plate tectonics demonstration.
This activity is one of our favorite technology activities for kids!
Find more STEM activities for kids here!
EDIBLE PLATE TECTONICS ACTIVITY FOR KIDS
Follow along with this tutorial to learn how to make your very own edible plate tectonics!
Continental Drift for Kids
The idea that continents and other land masses moved based on plate-like arrangements below the earth’s crust was first proposed by Alfred Wegener in 1915.
Basically, the theory of plate tectonics says that the earth’s lithosphere is broken into 15 large plates, with 8 plates bigger than the rest. These plates include:
- Africa
- North America
- Antarctic
- Pacific
- South America
- Eurasia
- Australia
- Nazka
Plate tectonic theory states that as hot magma rises and colder magma falls, it creates a sort of “boiling” effect, that causes continents to drift. There are four ways that landmasses move over time.
Plate Tectonics STEM Activity
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For this activity, we made chocolate cake covered in green icing (because grass) and illustrated how the continents have drifted apart over the lifespan of the world and how that has led to the current shape of our continents.
Plate Tectonics Activity Questions to Ask
After finishing our hands-on plate tectonics demonstration and discussing how landmasses move over time,
I had Monkey speculate about what will happen to the earth’s shape in the future.
We answered the following questions together:
- What will happen to continents in a few thousand years? A few million?
- Will continents always keep their current shape?
- How long would it take before you could noticeably see a difference in continental drift from space?
- How long would it take to notice a difference from earth?
- What would happen if continents collide?
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Supplies for a plate tectonics cake:
- Chocolate sheet cake (we used this recipe and make it in a cookie sheet)
- Frosting (we used this recipe and colored ours green)
- Knife
- Tectonic plate diagram
When we made our cake recipe, I spread it onto a cookie sheet so it would be thin enough to cut easily.
We used homemade cake and frosting because 1, I love cooking, and 2, we didn’t have any box cake and frosting.
The activity would be a lot shorter with a box mix or a sheet cake purchased from your local grocery store.
After the cake was completed and frosted, we eyeballed the plate shapes and cut them out with a knife.
If you wanted to be more accurate, you could try printing your plate diagram and placing it over your cake before cutting.
After cutting apart the cake, I had Monkey move the pieces apart slowly until they roughly represented their current place on the globe (as much as we could in 2D).
We talked about how landmasses can move and the construction of continents and the earth itself.
More Earth Science for Kids
