martinzoo

In our nature class today, we learned about rocks, minerals, and erosion. Then we went out on a hike through the park to find some rocks and run an experiment.

We touched on rock education a bit last year, but it’s always good to reinforce, especially when it’s interesting. Right?

So we talked about the three kinds of rocks: Igneous, Sedimentary, and Metamorphic. We also talked about what a rock really is. When you come down to it, rocks are a combination of chemicals and minerals, and oftentimes more than one mineral.

We talked about minerals, too. Minerals are different because their composition consists of a highly structured chemical compound. Whereas, rocks are not so structured. Some common minerals would be quartz and mica. Uncommon minerals could be a diamond, gold, or silver.

Here, the kids are looking at various examples that Miss Christen had available for them to touch.

On to the hike, where the kids were supposed to be looking for small rocks to use in our experiment on erosion.

This was a good example of erosion. This was on a hill, leading down to a small pond. The rainwater and wind caused the erosion.

Back at the nature center, we looked at our rocks, measured them, and recorded what info we had by drawing pictures of our rocks. Then we put our rocks in a container that was half-filled with water. GB is shaking the container vigorously to see if the water will cause erosion in the rocks. All the kids enjoyed the shaking process!

Then we poured the water/rock/debris onto filter paper to see the new shape of the rocks, and see any silt or sediment that was broken off by the water and shaking.

Hopefully, you can kind of see the debris that we got. We had some mica in one of our rocks, so a lot of that came off. We also had a fairy stone that lost a lot of what GB called “rock dust.”

This is the group of boys that GB was working with. I love all the color in this picture.

You may be able to tell from these pictures, but we had an uncommonly warm day today. Usually, February has temps in the 30’s or 40’s. But today we were at 76 degrees when we got home from the nature class. Shocking!