Let's Examine Minerals

We started today’s lesson by addressing one major misconception about rocks and minerals; that they are the same. We tend to use the terms rocks and minerals interchangeably and this is not accurate. So we explained that rocks are made up of two or more minerals and that minerals are naturally existing chemical compounds.  The students understood the difference because they remembered seeing that the rocks were made up of more than one mineral during our rocks lesson. 

                      
Conglomerate rock                                                 feldspar mineral

There was a lot of new vocabulary in this lesson.  We watched a Brainpop about Identifying Minerals. The students were given a handout with vocabulary words to listen for during the video. The students were paying attention and seemed to be interested in the video. After the video we asked the students if they were able to define the words based on what they heard and saw in the video.  This exercise was somewhat successful. We went over the definitions of the words on the list before we moved on the next part of the lesson.

                                                             

We started examining minerals during this week’s science class. We set up our class in 3 stations, prior to start of the lesson, where the students were to observe and record the minerals’ shape, smell, and feel.   They could also draw the mineral. We had the students rotate among the 3 stations in groups of 8 so that there weren’t too many students at one station.  Once the students got the hang of it I think it worked out pretty well.  The students were set up in color coded groups to help them move around the room in an orderly manner.  The students were a little overwhelmed observing 12 minerals and having 12 pieces of paper to manipulate. They were concerned about having enough time to accomplish all that we asked them to do. We did tell them not to worry about getting everything done today since we are going to be working with minerals for the next few weeks.  For next week’s lesson we are going to modify the stations so that the students have more time to get their work done.