Landforms Directed Cutting – Map Skills Activity

Have you ever heard of directed cutting?  I just made it up.  It’s like directed drawing, but with scissors and paper. It’s a process that you lead students through to create something by cutting shapes out of paper.  Not only can students learn the content by labeling the picture, but they also work on their cutting skills, a skill lacking in some of our classrooms. 

Here is a construction paper diagram that I created with students.  It’s been a few years, I’m I’m going to attempt to walk you through the process we went through to create the construction paper diagram. 

Gather Supplies

The first thing you need to do is organize supplies for students.  I cut construction paper into rectangles so that students started with a smaller piece of paper. 

Supplies included:

• A large white piece of construction paper
• Cut pieces of brown, yellow, dark blue, light blue, green (and other colors needed for the landform.

Day 1: Cut and Create the Landforms

For the first day, we just concentrated on cutting and creating our landforms.  I directed students on how to cut the mountains, how to cut the ocean, the lake, the river, etc.  I also showed them where to glue the pieces on their construction paper.  

You can be creative with the placement and cutting.  I suggest creating a template for yourself first, so you know the type of cutting you need to do with students.  They’re pretty basic cuts.  

We created landforms for the following words.  You can create cutouts for almost any landform.  This is what is concentrated on in this picture:

• Mountains
• River
• Lake
• Ocean
• Gulf
• Desert
• Hill
• Valley

Day 2: Label the Landforms

The second day, I gave students the labels with a description.  Students cut apart the labels and glued them down on the correct landform. 

By separating the cutting and the descriptions into two days, we were able to have a deeper discussion about the attributes of the landforms.  

Extending the Social Studies Learning

After creating our diagram, we sorted landform picture, name and definitions. I don’t have a resource for this.  I found a free one on TpT somewhere. 

Additional Social Studies Location and Map Resources

I do have an entire resource on Location and Map Skills.  This resource does not include a study of landforms but does apply landforms when labeling a map of North America. 

Check out the Location and Map Skills product here.