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Grade: Elementary
Subject: Science
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In Reply to: Looking for lessons on rock amd minerals elementary level third grade posted by Diane Morgan on
February 02, 1997 at 08:06:03:Suggest you search AIMS activities (Activities to Integrate Math and Science) Great beginning rock lessons for
students called Pet Rock. Use Byrd Baylors "Everybody Needs a Rock" to intro your unit and have students
follow the rules in the book to bring in a special rock they can hide in their closed fist...so you don't get
boulders.
Also suggest you make a poster or chart with the Moh's hardness scale and challenge students to put the
information into a rap, chant, poem, or lyric set to a familiar tune.
Creative writing about being between a rock and a hard place was fun for my third graders. Also creative writing
pretending they were a rock and describing what they had seen (as the rock) occur in their environment.
Birthstones was a good way for the kid's to get interested in gems. For minerals we looked at what it meant on
food packaging you know that Fortified with Vitamins and minerals approach. Kids picked a mineral to do a mini
research poster on and had to visually display their info to classmates.
We established a rock collection that eventually we used as our weights and mass measures when the kids were
using our balances for anything. The beauty of this was that the rocks came in a wide range of gram weights and
so the students had real practice adding dissimilar numbers rather than the neat and easy multiples of 1, 5, and
10's.
Went to a hobby store and got some inexpensive geodes that we broke open in class to add to our class museum
collection. Each piece had an info card that students added info to as it was found. Kids sought special rocks
from parents, grandparents, etc. to have as on loan pieces for our museum. Students also developed rules about
class collection handling and care of rocks.
Took a walk outside and picked up a rock, pretended to hear it's story by holding it to my ear. Told the rock's
story about riding an icey glacier to these parts and how the glacier left this rock here as proof that it had been
here, but that the rock missed it's family up north and wondered if we'd heard of them....
Students started listening to rocks and came up with stories about the day a rock was thrown at a child, or the day
the rock was kicked down the road...the day a bulldozer gave the rock a ride.....
We talked about the rock cycle and played rock bingo.
The kids loved rocks unit. Hope this gives you some ideas.
Here's some urls to help;
AIMS - www.aimsedu.org
Ask an Expert - www.askanexpert.com
Hope this helps! Kitty Swan
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