Science: Geology Notebooking Activity

I have a fun idea to share.  You don't need to be doing a full blown geology study to do it either.  Just a few goodies and some kids who enjoy such things.

Mineral Experiment Activity  

Supplies Needed

Scale that can accurately measure lighter weights

-think below an ounce- 

(My son used our good postal scale)

Mineral Kit

(they also sell a rock kit too)

or

Several minerals you have about, a nail and a streak plate

Pencil, eraser, color pencils, glue stick

Ruler with centimeters on it

 Experiment worksheets from the Crafty Classroom

Notebook

Basically the student works thru the listed activities on the worksheet to figure out different qualities/traits of the mineral. My son truly enjoyed this activity.  I hope your student(s) will too. Be sure to have them place their worksheets into a binder/notebook or little booklet.  

The Crafty Classroom has a very detailed post on how to set up fun activity stations for exploring rocks/minerals. Actually, I was so excited to come across this site.  There are lots of great ideas to help you homeschool.  

Nature study: Rocks and Gems

Please Note: I have updated this post that originally was posted on my Charlotte Mason blog.

A year back we used the Considering God's Creation program for my son's science. When we covered the Rocks and Gems section, I used the following books and resources to cover this unit.

So in true CM fashion, we set up an area for displaying our rock collection.  It was very easy to get a collection going [we live in a sub that was built on an old gravel pit so the rocks are literally everywhere] which was fun to display. The egg carton [I switched to the clear egg cartons so we could label them and still see what we had] served as a nice tote for the rocks which kept them organized and in one place.

 *all books are from the library, and you need a big variety due to there being so many rocks-the cross reference is necessary. Unless you have a geologist/petrologist in the family. The elephant carving was a gift  :) but that is soapstone, so it counts.

There are only a couple of these pages from the Considering God's Creation student workbook. I made copies [permissible as noted in the front of the guide] as I wanted the boy to do quite a few pages to document more of the rocks we found.