The Three Types of Rocks
My students and I have been studying the three types of rocks: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. Some were getting it, some were not. It didn't help that this was my first year teaching it and so I had to relearn the concepts myself! We also had to learn about the rock cycle, which in my opinion is a heck of a lot harder than the water cycle which they learn later on in the curriculum.
The Rock Cycle
I was so lucky to have discovered the Science Notebooking blog early on in my career. The lady who writes this blog is an absolute genius science teacher for elementary kids. Whenever I am stuck on a science lesson, I go to her and she rarely lets me down! We even included the Rock Cycle Song "We Will Rock You" to our lesson!
This time she shared a lesson she found where students visit different stations to "Ride the Rock Cycle". They have a page to record their journey, and at each station they roll the dice to find out what happened to them as a rock.
The original lesson is from Illinois State Museum, and you can get all the materials from their website. It really helped my students with recognizing that the rock cycle is, in fact, a cycle. They might visit the same center more than three times! The first couple rounds were a struggle for my lower readers, but many of them naturally paired up with other students and in the end they all loved it!
There is a comic the kids do afterwards, but we are doing that next week! Here is an example from the Science Notebooking blog:
Infamous Edible Rocks
To firm up my munchkins understanding of how each type of rock is formed, I was completely stuck. Then, after searching Google and Pinterest, I figured out that most people use food to teach them! I did the same... I borrowed the idea from a million different websites who did it slightly differently for each one.
My class started out with igneous rocks. We used melted chocolate for our lava/magma and ice cream for our Earth's surface. The children loved how the ice cream caused the melted chocolate to harden, just like the lava would cool and harden on Earth's surface.
My class started out with igneous rocks. We used melted chocolate for our lava/magma and ice cream for our Earth's surface. The children loved how the ice cream caused the melted chocolate to harden, just like the lava would cool and harden on Earth's surface.
We then created sedimentary rocks. The students used graham crackers and icing for this one. Belatedly I thought I should have given them some animal cracker or gummi animal to create a "fossil" in their sedimentary rock, but this still worked.
Last, but certainly not least, was our metamorphic rocks. They were starbursts that were squashed together using our heat and pressure from our hands.