Treasure Hunt

Treasure! Now that's rocks with bling!

studying our gems and gold

What IS treasure? I used the 'I Spy Treasure Hunt' book by  Jean Marzollo and Walter Wick to introduce the idea of treasure. They love the game of finding the objects in the pictures - I used the Antiques Shop page and introduced the idea of maps (and, inevitably, pirates!), and clues, by using the old map and comparing it with the photograph of the same place many years later.  You have to be careful with the whole pirates thing because of course they were really violent thieves, not just Robin Hood in a boat. Still, we pretended we would be searching for hidden treasure to return to the owners!

Gold and jewels are of course rocks with value and belong in a treasure chest! I have one from my son's experience at 4 or 5, going on a sail with his best friend and landing at a beach where his friend's Mom and Dad had hidden a chest complete with map and - a Black Spot! They had read Treasure Island (the Real one!!) by R.L Stevenson so it was such a thrill! The black spot made it's rounds among his friends for years and years (I still expect it to turn up).
  I loaded the chest with toy gold coins and jewels and hid it in the classroom. Were they thrilled when it was found!!

Oohs and Aaahs when the chest is opened!

Making a 'Treasure Island' in the classroom was another route to finding treasure. Using a rug as the basic island, the children placed trees, volcanoes and rocks all around and then had to find individual treasure items hidden there - under the volcano, or under a rock, before hunting for the whole chest.

lifting a rock to find a gold coin!

As you can see, we added animals as well to make the island more authentic. Watch out for that wild boar!  And the Barbary Apes and poisonous snakes making our quest ever more dangerous!!!

The jewels and coins were much admired and compared and, of course, coveted but luckily there was plenty to go around.

Rocks for all ages

My classroom globe wears many hats, but this week it showed the children it's true identity - a chunk of rock!

my collections table

They all love volcanoes, and many know about lava, but comparing the earth to an undercooked muffin seemed to work best since for the past week or two, the classes seemed to be vying for the best pumpkin muffin recipe to make and eat. Our planet is like a muffin where the top (CRUST) is set and cooled but the inside is still hot and runny, like magma that erupts from a volcano.

I had the classes pick out, without looking, an object from a 'mystery box', and tell us what they guessed it was from the TEXTURE ('feel'). I had pompoms, rubber balls, lego bricks, feathers and other stuff among a variety of rocks, and the idea that they could identify each object without looking was, for some of them, quite a revelation. This encouraged them to search for vocabulary that best described what the objects felt like - soft, squishy, smooth, tickly, bumpy, scratchy, cold. I then got the 4's and some of the 3's, to just look at the items and use words to describe them, as if to a friend wearing a blindfold, or someone at night. You could almost see their brains trying to find the right words, a terrific way to exercise those neurons!

We then sorted the rocks into families. The concept of 'same' and 'different', is present in the 4s but only some of the 3s, and since these rocks were different shapes and sizes and colors it was quite a challenge. Still, if you put a rock down and asked them to search for one that looked 'like' that one, most of them found they could do it. Asked how they could study the rocks better, some children suggested magnifying glasses - fantastic idea!!

Classification began with sorting according to size:

size families

Color:

color families

and texture:

texture families

Of course the real way to do this is density, but I wasn't going there although I could have weighed some of them. Maybe I will next time.

The final part of the lesson was a rock hunt in the classroom. I had hidden, under plates, a rock for each child to find, they LOVE any kind of hunt. You can get them to find more than one if you have time of course. They then had to see if one of their friends had a similar rock, or to pick a similar one out of the collection box (each rock I hid had a family member also hidden, or in the box)

I have a bunch of rock books on display for the children to look at, here they are:

The titles are: Geology Rocks, by Cindy Blobaum and Michael Kline
Rocks. Hard, Smooth, Soft and Amazing (Amazing Science), by Rosinsky et al
If you find a Rock, by Peggy Christian
Let's go Rock Collecting, by Roma Gans.

See you next week for a treasure hunt! Now THAT'S rocks we can all relate to!!

Sharing our planet with living and non-living neighbors

Reminding the children about sharing resources with other people leads to discussing sharing those same resources with the myriad other life forms on earth, most of which pre-date and outnumber us! I also wanted to introduce rocks and minerals, so why not distinguish between living things (plants and animals), and non-living things (rocks, minerals, water etc).
I put a bunch of different toy plants (play food, plastic flowers), toy animals and bugs, shells, rocks and minerals into a brown bag and each child blind-selected 2 items. We identified each item and categorized it as plant or animal (living) or non-living (never alive rather than dead, extinct etc). I got a wealth of tales about grandparents dying when we approached the 'once alive' area, some of which were really touching and interesting I must say, and initially sidetracked me for a large part of the lesson! Anyway I deflected further family history and got down to dividing the items on 3 large trays - Animal, Plant and Non-Living. Basically, living things grow and reproduce and non-living things do not. It's not an easy concept for 3s and 4s and I slipped in a tricky one - a unicorn (doesn't exist) and a shell (you try to guess that one!!).

Hmm. apples are, um, oh - plants!!

animal, vegetable or mineral?

 Where do we humans put ourselves?

Somehow this picture refuses to stand up but you get the idea - yes, we are all animals!

Balancing ecosystems is delicate and removing one item can bring them tumbling if we don't look at their interrelationships - let's illustrate this with a balancing game they can take turns at. Who can remove one item without tipping the pile?

ecosystem balancing game

getting that rock out was hard!

 Man-made disasters like an oil spill or rainforest logging (Fern Gully, the last rainforest) were mentioned and we brainstormed ways we could help prevent more of the same in the future. Books like 'Oil Spill!' by Melvin Berger are also food for thought and offer possible ways we can help.