** Contains affiliate link at no cost to you **
Oh here we are again, my son’s favourite topic: rocks! Last year we worked on identifying the types of rocks: igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic. This year, I added minerals to our studies, to advance our studies in the Rock Cycle.
This years’ objectives for Rocky Cycle study:
- Review the classification of rocks
- Identify the characteristics of rocks
- Identify the characteristics of minerals
- Difference between rocks and minerals
- Products of rocks and minerals
- Igneous rock collection
- Metamorphic rock collection
- Sedimentary rock collection (I don’t have this)
- Minerals collection. I purchased the mineral collection from Learning Resources when it was on sale in Amazon last year.
- Digital microscope (optional)
- Rock and Fossil Hunter Book A really good book that provides a table of rocks and minerals, with lots of experiments and activities.
This is how we worked on each rock. I created learning cards for each collection, the links are at the end of this post.
Comparing rocks and minerals
Comparing Pyrite (fools’ gold and real gold)
Colours of minerals. Trying to draw and identify the colours of each minerals.
Rocks vs Minerals. Combined a few igneous, metamorphic and minerals then have Mavi sort them according to: minerals, rocks and “not sure”. Mavi had so much fun here!
Looking closely. We used our digital microscope (husband provided this) to have a closer look for our rocks, to check for some crystal formations :)Metamorphic
Igneous
Minerals
FREE printable files:
You can also purchase an entire pack of rock materials (I suggest this!). If you have a budget, it's better to get them all at once so you can pull out a prolific rock study. And of these two would be perfect!
What a super fun lesson! We will be doing this next year! :)
ReplyDelete