Rocks and Minerals

Invite a guest speaker to talk about rocks and minerals in the classroom. Allow students to ask the speaker questions.

Explain what your favorite rock or mineral is and, using supportive details, tell why.

Select a rock or mineral and tell what that material is used for in our everyday lives. Explain why this rock or mineral is used as opposed to other options.

Allow students to bring rocks to school in groups of ten in order to collect enough to make groups of 100. Make as many groups of 100 as they can in a given length of time.

Use real or interactive whiteboard images of rocks to compare quantities of rocks in double digits.

Using the standard means of identifying minerals (hardness, luster, color, streak, and magnetism) have students categorize 10 minerals and create a graph (both line and bar) to represent the data that they collected. 

Living things need water, air, and resources from the land. They live in places that have the things they need.

Sunlight warms Earth's surface.

Examples of Earth's surface could include sand and rocks.

Wind and water can change the shape of the land.

Because there is always more than one possible solution to a problem, it is useful to compare and test designs.

Some Earth events happen very quickly; others occur very slowly, over a time period much longer than one can observe.

Examples of events and timescales could include volcanic explosions and earthquakes, which happen quickly, and erosion of rocks, which occurs slowly.

Rainfall helps to shape the land and affects the types of living things found in a region. Water, ice, wind, living organisms, and gravity break rocks, soils, and sediments into smaller particles and move them around.

Examples of variables to test could include angle of slope in the downhill movement of water, amount of vegetation, relative rate of deposition, cycles of freezing and thawing of water, cycles of heating and cooling, and volume of water flow.

Local, regional, and global patterns of rock formations reveal changes over time due to earth forces, such as earthquakes. The presence and location of certain fossil types indicate the order in which rock layers were formed.

Examples of evidence from patterns could include rock layers with marine shell fossils above rock layers with plant fossils and no shells, indicating a change from land to water over time; and a canyon with different rock layers in the walls and a river in the bottom, indicating that over time a river cut through rock.

Earth's major systems are the geosphere (solid and molten rock, soil, and sediments), the hydrosphere (water and ice), the atmosphere (air), and the biosphere (living things, including humans). These systems interact in multiple ways to affect Earth's surface materials and processes.

Humans depend on Earth’s land, ocean, atmosphere, and biosphere for many different resources.

Examples of uneven distributions of resources as a result of past processes include but are not limited to petroleum (locations of the burial of organic marine sediments and subsequent geologic traps), metal ores (locations of past volcanic and hydrothermal activity associated with subduction zones), and soil (locations of active weathering and/or deposition of rock).

Maps of ancient land and water patterns, based on investigations of rocks and fossils, make clear how Earth's plates have moved great distances, collided, and spread apart. Examples of data include similarities of rock and fossil types on different continents, the shapes of the continents (including continental shelves), and the locations of ocean structures (such as ridges, fracture zones, and trenches).

The planet's systems interact over scales that range from microscopic to global in size, and they operate over fractions of a second to billions of years.

All Earth processes are the result of energy flowing and matter cycling within and among the planet's system. This energy is derived from the sun and Earth's hot interior. Emphasis is on the processes of melting, crystallization, weathering, deformation, and sedimentation, which act together to form minerals and rocks through the cycling of Earth's materials.

The geologic time scale interpreted from rock strata provides a way to organize Earth's history.

Emphasis is on how analyses of rock formations and the fossils they contain are used to establish relative ages of major events in Earth's history.

Emphasis is on finding patterns of changes in the level of complexity of anatomical structures in organisms and the chronological order of fossil appearance in the rock layers.