Rockin' It

Continuing on with our unit study on rocks and minerals...


One of the features we discussed about rocks was that they are not alive. We talked about what it meant to be alive, gave examples of things that were alive and things that were not alive, then I had Madison draw pictures of both categories.

Not Alive
The things she came up with were a pencil, paper, a shirt, pants, shoes, a volcano, a car, a house, rocks, a chair, a dresser, and a TV.

In her Alive category, she drew pictures of girls, a flower, grass, a dog, a duck, and a bird.

For a fun art project the kids painted rocks, then I painted the letters of their names on them.

We are attempting to make rock candy. I realize that this project takes some time, and as you can see, our string only has a few little candy crystals on it. Hopefully they will grow larger because my kids are really excited about this!

The recipe we used for the rock candy came from this site: http://www.wikihow.com/Make-Rock-Candy

We talked about crystals and about the various things that are made from crystals.

I found this crystal growing kit at our Family Dollar store, and like our rock candy, we are still in the process of seeing our crystals grow.

Here is what they look like as of today.

We spent one day discussing volcanoes in depth. We read through this book, "Volcanoes" and talked about how volcanoes are made of rock, and lava (magma) is hot, melted rock.

I really wanted to show the kids how a volcanic rock floats, and my husband thought he might have found a volcanic rock for us. It definitely looked like one, however, when we put it in water, it sunk. I guess looks can be deceiving.

We created our own volcano out of homemade play dough. We put baking soda inside it, then we poured tinted vinegar into it. The kids really had fun watching our volcano "erupt".

Here is the video of our volcano erupting.

One final rock-themed activity that I wanted to accomplish was reading the old folk story "Stone Soup" and then making our own stone soup for supper one day. I requested the book from the library quite some time ago but it still hasn't come in, and we are ready to move on from our rock lesson. I think what I might have to do is find the story online and read it to the kids, because I just don't know how much longer the book is going to take to come in at the library.

Our next theme is Jewels/Gems, so it should be a pretty easy transition from rocks and minerals.