After rowing When I Was Young in the Mountains and Wee Gillis, we took some time to study rocks and mountains. I found this fun lesson guide at The Teacher Wife's store and we used many of the pages to keep track of what Jack was learning. I put the little rock characters (the ones you see on the picture above) on the wall along with the rock cycle diagram (also included in the packet) and he really liked those and had the types of rocks and how they were made memorized right away!
We spent some time looking at rock samples--the fossil was from Jack's camp class this year and I picked up the rock kit at the museum gift shop.
We tried out the erosion experiment and other than splattering the kitchen floor, it worked pretty well.
We also did a lot of cooking over the course of the unit. All About Rocks had directions for this yummy sedimentary snack.
Tracey has many fun ideas for studying rocks on her blog--such as making brownies when we learned about metamorphic rocks...
Some of the books we used
And a few more--you can watch the Reading Rainbow episode for the Magic School Bus Inside the Earth here. (Sorry about the twisty picture--I tried twice and gave up!)
Today we wrapped up with some fossil cookies. I didn't actually use the nice stony-looking recipe that Martha made, nor did I make sure my insects were "food safe"--I figure if Alice has chewed on them plain as much as she has, they aren't going to hurt her if I mash them in the cookie dough for a minute.
Ta da! They turned out pretty cute! I found this idea on Homeschool Share's October Calendar (on October 12, which is National Fossil Day). If you haven't checked out the new calendar, you need to! It's full of fun ideas--October 21 is National Pumpkin Cheesecake Day, and I noticed on the pumpkin bread mix box I got the other day that they have a recipe for Pumpkin Cheesecake Muffins!
I picked up this Magic Rocks kit at Mardel a while back when I had a coupon and we set it up this afternoon.
Ours hasn't turned out quite like the one on the box (though this was just an hour or so after it started), which I think is probably due to my guesstimation of the water temperature. We had fun anyway!
2 comments:
I'm so glad you're doing this now because this is a new unit I'm going to do with ours soon (or at least Max). I'm using the unit that HSS has and then putting together other stuff as well. Now I'll get to see all of the super fun stuff you do at your house to inspire me to do it too. You always do the coolest things!
And now I guess I'd better get on the ball.
Love the fossil cookies! Can't wait to study fossils with my little man so we can try this! Love finding another homeschool family in the area as well!
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