More Adventures with Rocks & Minerals...

It's my little geologist Starlet...magnified... :-)

This morning we met up with some friends for a playgroup at a local park, and so to continue our first week of Summer of Science on rocks and minerals, I decided we could use the opportunity to do a little rock hunting. I gave each child an egg carton and had them collect rocks they thought were interesting. Here is Monkey's collection:

We dropped by the store on the way home to pick up some magnifying glasses so that we could take a closer look at our specimens (as you saw Starlet modeling above) and then we went home and after lunch we opened our boxes to see what we had found.

According to this geology field guide, nearly every rock was some form of granite! Which I found ironic, considering how much it costs to get granite countertops...

I then had the kids pick a few of their favorite rocks and trace their outlines into their notebooks and then try to color them as accurately as possible, including the various colored specks. We talked about the colors and shapes of the rocks as we did it.

I had Monkey take this a step further by having him write the word "granite" next to his pictures, and we talked about how granite is an igneous rock, so he wanted to write "igneous" also. Oh, and I pointed out that the stuff in pencils is actually a kind of rock too, and I found a photo of graphite in the book to show them. They thought that was cool.

Here is his completed journal entry for the day:

It was a fun and simple activity for the day. I think later this afternoon we'll watch one of the dvds we got from the library, and maybe tomorrow we'll try some rock experiments...