Plate Tectonics Basics
📋 What it is
Earth’s crust is broken into giant plates that slowly move, carrying continents and reshaping the planet.
🗣️ Coach says
Earth’s hard outer shell is cracked into huge slabs called tectonic plates that float on the hot, slowly-flowing rock below. They creep — only centimetres a year — but over millions of years they carry continents apart, crash them together, and build mountains, oceans and much of Earth’s surface.
🧠 Memory hook
Crust = giant moving PLATES. They creep cm/year but reshape continents, oceans and mountains over ages.
😂 Giggle
Why did the tectonic plates break up?
There was too much friction in the relationship!
😲 Whoa!
The plates move about as fast as your fingernails grow — yet over millions of years that’s enough to move whole continents thousands of kilometres.
✅ Quick check: What are tectonic plates and what do they do?
Say your answer out loud first — then reveal.
Giant slabs of Earth’s crust that slowly move, carrying continents and reshaping the surface over millions of years.
Plate motion drives Earth’s large-scale geology.
🧪 Try it! (2 minutes)
Look at a world map — South America and Africa fit like puzzle pieces because they were once joined.