Magnetism and Streak

Mineral testing continues. This week we tested for magnetism and streak. Streak is the identifiable color of a mineral in its powder form.  The students are well on their way to completing their minerals field guides.  I think we have improved our classroom management by reorganizing the way the testing is done and breaking the minerals into groups of 6. It was less chaotic having the students look at 2 sets of 6 minerals than to have them work with one set of 12 minerals. We also used this lesson to give students some time to catch up on anything they were missing from their field guides. 

  

As far as instructional technology goes we showed the students a website, www.rockhounds.com, which has a professional field guide on it. In hindsight this website was not the most child friendly but it did have lots of useful information about minerals on it. We did suggest that the students could view this site with the help of an adult. 

For the writing portion of the class we had the students pick a mineral and write clues about it on index cards. Then they read the clues to a classmate and challenged him to guess which mineral it is. The students wrote excellent clues and they enjoyed trying to stump each other with their descriptions.  This wasn’t exactly what the writing portion should have been so we are going to be addressing it again in the next lesson.

                                                   

We are almost finished with our field guides and our lessons. I’m looking forward to seeing the finished products of our hard-working Geologists!!