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!!