Chad sips lemonade during happy child camp fun!
If you know about geology, you'll recognize the title of this article as a useful mnemonic device. If not, here's your chance to learn something new! Minerals are classified according to these properties:
- Color
- Streak
- Luster
- Density
- Hardness
- Luster
- Crystal Systems
- Cleavage and Fracture
John Widman of Dublin Schools created several resources to help him cover information about minerals with his 6th grade science students in a virtual format. These resources support the geology lesson Rocks vs Minerals available free on the OOGEEP website.
Minerals: the stuff that rocks are made of helped students learn the 5 characteristics that make an item a mineral. Mineral properties covered the list above. These presentations provided a fun way for students to review and perform the properties test virtually.
Widman said, "In our situation, some students were working on the Pear Deck in class individually and overall, they liked the activity. They have had little introduction to minerals but much of it surrounds the properties that are not very good for classification like color. The master mines game we played was a hit as the students were able to explore the 'mines' and perform tests on the samples recovered.
These activities helped cover standard 6.1, Minerals have specific, quantifiable properties. Minerals have properties that can be observed and measured. Minerals form in specific environments. Widman's class will follow this unit with one on rocks and finally, one on soil, to show the relationship between the three.
The workshop helped me to consider teaching strategies and lessons that I had not considered before. I enjoyed the virtual speaker and how he described the ground in relation to the oil and gas industries; this broadened my thinking process toward both. I also enjoyed the tour of the gravel pit and seeing how the operation extracted the earth's resources and reclaimed it, as this will be a topic in our soil unit later on.