Silver Cove

Chris and Melissa from, Silver Cove came and presented their Rock Talk to our grade 3s this week.  They always have a very informative and engaging presentation for us!

Sorting Rocks

This week in science we discussed different properties of rocks and how to organize, sort and classify them. Students used their own rock collections and sorted their rocks into categories of colour, shape, and texture.  After they sorted their rocks they were asked to come up with ways to describe each of the properties. I loved listening to the discussions and watching how engaged they were in the activity.  Way to go!

"Rock Show"

Our rocks and minerals unit started off with our very own "Rock Show".  Students got to share their rock collections with the class.  We will use these collections for other activities during our study of rocks and minerals.

Layers of the earth models

Check out these cool models of the layers of the earth.

Students work in partners to make one earth, then we cut them in half so that each student has one dissection of the earth.  Students then label each of the layers.

Sorting Rocks

September 22

We kicked off our Rocks and Minerals unit with a rock sorting activity with, Mrs. Fedun's grade 3 class. We chatted about our rock collections and then talked about different properties of rocks and how we could sort the rocks in our personal collections.   The students have some great rock collections, some pretty special rocks!

Here are a few pictures of the sorting activity.

Soil Samples

November 30th

Today, as one of our final experiments with Rocks and Minerals, we examined different types of soil. Students were challenged to describe the colour and texture of each sample and also to examine what kinds of sediments they could find in the samples.  We were trying to discover the answer to the question "What is soil?"

The three samples were: sand, potting soil and peat moss.

Some great descriptions I overheard were:  moist, damp, dry, gritty, dark, light, bumpy, lumpy.

Here are a few pictures of the students engaged in the experiment.

Testing Rocks and Minerals

November 23rd

We spent the afternoon testing the rocks in our collections trying to classify them and determine their hardness.

We did scratch testing and referred to Moh's hardness scale to determine how hard our rocks and minerals were.  We did streak test to figure out the mineral colours in our rocks and we did an acid test to find out if our rocks would fizz (meaning they may contain the minerals dolomite or calcite).  It was a fun afternoon.

Scratching with a penny

Acid test (Vinegar) 

Scratching Soap stone, 1-2 on the hardness scale.

Limestone fizzes!

Pumice floats!