A-MUSE-ing Rocks

During July, we built on a student interest: rocks!  Each child at Harmony's House has a rock collection at home, so we brought that interest alive in the classroom as well.  One small group activity was to use magnifying glasses to study an assortment of rocks.

We talked about things that we noticed and recorded our observations for parents to appreciate.  Some of our rocks were geodes, cooling slowly after having lots of heat and pressure.  This made crystals form.  Some of our rocks were full of bubbles (holes), made by volcanoes.

Other rock samples were magnetic, and we found one other rock besides hematite that was also magnetic.  We found rocks that were flat (sandstone), rough (desert rose and scoria), and smooth (apache tears and agate).

Some of our rocks were special because they were fossils!  Fossils are rocks that are remnants of something that was once alive such as a plant or animal.  We know about dinosaurs because of fossils!  So we naturally played with dinosaurs too.

Our Explore Table was filled with kinetic sand, rocks, dinosaurs, and aquarium plants.  The wonderful thing about the kinetic sand was that it would show us how dinosaurs made tracks that could be preserved.  We could also pretend that a dinosaur was hatching from an egg.  Finally, we could bury a dinosaur and see how the body left prints behind.  Remnants of bones, eggs, tracks, and even dinosaur poop helps us learn about how dinosaurs lived long ago.

In the Art Area, we used toy dinosaur skeletons to again talk about fossils... but we also used them to see whether the dinosaur walked on two legs or four.  The prints turned out great!

No childhood can be considered complete without rocks and dinosaurs.  What a fun unit this has been for our miniature geologists!

Play-doh Plates (the Tectonic Kind!)

This week we dug deeper into the idea of Our Earth, kind of literally.  First we used a book to see illustrations of the Earth and interior layers.  We learned new vocabulary like "crust," "tectonic plates," and "magma" (melted rocks that the tectonic plates float on).

Next we used play-doh to form tectonic plates and discover three ways the Earth makes mountains.

1.  Fold mountains- a real world example of tectonic collision is the Himalayan mountains, and these types of mountains are identifiable by their jagged peaks

2.  Volcanic eruptions- when a tectonic plate moves over a hot spot and magma pushes up onto the land, we call it a volcanic eruption (like the Hawaiian islands)

3.  Dome mountains- sometimes the magma pushes up but does not find an outlet, and it cools forming a rounded mountain

Lastly, we observed how when tectonic plates fold, collide, go under one another (subduction), the Earth makes layers.  When lots of heavy mountains are on top, and really hot magma is underneath, the layers in the middle are changed through pressure and heat.  This is how we get different kinds of rocks.  In summary, geology rocks!  Especially when reenacted with play-doh.  ;)