Mountains, valleys, rivers and oceans are some of the first geography words a third grader meets at school, and they are easy to mix up. A hill and a mountain are both raised land. A lake and an island are opposites, water ringed by land and land ringed by water, and children often swap them. This worksheet teaches eight words: mountain, hill, valley, plain, river, lake, ocean and island. It starts from one drawn landscape that shows all eight together, so your child can see that the valley is the low land between the two mountains and that the river runs downhill from it to the ocean.
Some questions ask what a tagged place in the picture is called. Others ask what a word means, which of two things is taller or bigger, and what kind of place the Mississippi, the Rockies or Hawaii is. Every wrong choice is another real landform, so guessing does not work. If your child is unsure, ask them to describe what they see at the tag before they read the choices. The picture also prints as an outline to colour in.
What your child will learn
Name a mountain, hill, valley and plain in a picture
Tell a river, a lake and an ocean apart
Say what makes an island an island
Sort famous real places into landforms and bodies of water
Worked example
Look at the tagged piece of land in the ocean. It has water on every side, so it is an island. A lake is the opposite: water with land on every side.
Common mistake
Mixing up an island and a lake, or calling every raised piece of land a mountain.
Helpful hint
Look at the shape, then look at what is all around it.
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