OHC - Rock Study Grid

When I looked at the topic for this months nature study - my heart sank. Rocks! What can we possibly learn about rocks? (May I just add here that usually when have this attitude I find that I learn allot more than I think I will! LOL)

First thing to do was to find out a little more about rocks from my Handbook of Nature Study. I always find that once I have done a bit of research for my own personal gain, I am more enthusiastic to tackle the focus areas with my girls.

Although I learnt about the three groups of rocks - sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic - in high school, it's not as though I've had oodles of opportunity to recall these tidbits. But once I started reading and remembering, what I did recall was how much I loved learning about rock formations and rocks in my geography lessons. I vividly recall driving through the African landscape with my parents on holiday and finding a deep sense of satisfaction in being able to identify rock formations. Hmmmm - maybe looking at rocks won't be so bad!

We started our indoor preparation time with discussing in general the three groups and briefly outlining what characteristics distinguished each group and reading little excerpts from the Handbook. Our focus was sedimentary rocks. The girls narrated everything they knew about sedimentary rocks - which was actually quite a bit - and we discussed some 'rocky' sayings, 'hitting rock bottom', that sort of thing.

Our outdoor goals, some of which were suggested in the grid, were to:
*collect a variety of rocks
*throw pebbles into a pond
*find a rock that we could use to draw on the sidewalk

Our finds:

A rather magnificent rock with some lovely layers for us to observe.

Seeing that rocks not only provide homes and shelter for little creatures, but also provide a home to various moss, lichens and other plant life.

The side of the lake showed a lovely example of how layers of sedimentary rock are formed. We could clearly see the layers of clay and sediment in the cut away bank.

We searched the river bed for some rocks for our collection.

Once home we laid out our collection...

and set to splitting some of them to see what was inside.

We found that most of the rocks we found were easy to open up and we were able to write on the patio with nearly all of them.

We have a very  high clay content in our area and this was evident in almost all of our rocks.

Once we had done our hands on exploring we headed inside to add and entry into our nature journals and narrate a little of what we discovered.

This has been a great launching pad into this months nature focus area. I'm looking forward to taking this study to the next level :o)