Teaching the Rock Cycle

Typically, I like to teach history, one botany or zoology, geography, and science in my Lower Elementary Montessori Classroom each week, but this week I did something different. I focused the whole week on Rocks and Minerals. 

Monday

On Monday, I taught the students about the three types of rocks and minerals and a little bit about the rock cycle. We took a look at the examples of our rocks we have in our classroom. We talked about igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic rocks.

Tuesday

On Tuesday, we took a deeper look at the rock cycle. We talked about weathering+cementing, heat and pressure, and cooling. We used the Waseca Biomes Rock Cycle to show this. The students matched the cards. Some years, I have the students draw their own Rock Cycles and nobody chose to do that this year, but it is a fun one!

Wednesday

On Wednesday, we talked about minerals. All rocks are minerals. We also talked about the Mohs Hardness Scale. We talked about the finger tip test and how diamonds are the hardest minerals and how talc is the softest. 

Thursday

On Thursday, we measured the rocks by using gram weights. The students loved this one and did it multiple times. 

Friday

Typically, I don’t present a new cultural work on Friday, so the students can pick what they would like to work on completely, but I wanted to talk about gold and pyrite to finish out our Rock and Minerals work. I like to talk about this because there is a fun activity to do where you can “mine for gold” aka chocolate chips in cookies! You can use hard and soft cookies and then a paper clip and tooth pick to extract the chocolate chips. It is a fun activity that students really enjoy. 

Like I typically do, I could have spread these out the whole month, just presenting these concepts on “science day”, which is typically presented on Thursday. It was fun to do all these activities within the week, though! I think it made the students more involved and interested in the topics, than just simply completing the works.