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Overview: After reading the book Everybody Needs a Rock, children discuss and make their own rules for choosing a rock to study, actually pick a rock to observe and describe, and infer and explain kinds of rocks and where they came from.
Booklink: Everybody Needs a Rock by Byrd Baylor, Antheneum Books for Young Readers, 1974. ISBN 0-684-13899-9a
Science Activity Link: Children select a rock, observe, describe, and record its properties, and infer where the rock came from and how it got to where it was found.
Objective: Children will observe, describe, and record the properties of rocks, classify them into groups based on properties, and infer their origins and evolution.
Science Processes and Content: Processes-observing, communicating, classifying, recording data, measuring, using space/time relationships, defining operationally, formulating models, and inferring. Content-earth materials and rocks, properties of objects, and change over time.
National Science Education Standards: Unifying Concepts and Processes, (1) Science as Inquiry, (4) Earth and Space Science, (5) Science and Technology, (6) Science in Personal and Social Perspectives, (7) Science as a Human Endeavor
Materials: Book Everybody Needs a Rock, assorted rocks (pebbles), rulers, and magnifying lenses
Procedure:
1. Read the book Everybody Needs a Rock and discuss it with the children, asking them to tell you or write their own rules for selecting a favorite rock (pebble).
2. Go on a field trip to have the children find a special rock. Focus their attention on small rocks that fit easily into their hands. Marble-sized ones work best for moving and storage. The field trip can be around the school, along a driveway or road, or anywhere near the school where a variety of rocks can be collected. An alternate plan is to have a cache of stones of your own from which children can choose. Return to class and have the children determine if the rock they chose fits their rules or explain why they chose the rock they did.
3. Using the magnifying lenses, have the children observe their rocks, draw a sketch of it, and write down on a data sheet some of its properties (smooth, red, bumpy, one centimeter in size, etc.). Then have the children hold up their rocks for all to see and have them describe their properties.
4. You may wish to have the children move about the room observing other children's rocks and grouping themselves into groups of "geologists" that have rocks similar to theirs. For example, all the speckled may be in a group, or all the sandstones, or all the smooth rocks. Have them discuss and describe how the rocks are the same and different.
5. Finally, ask the children to infer where their rocks originally came from (interior of the Earth, mountains, bigger rocks, etc.), how they got so small (broken by ice, water, crashing into other rocks after rolling down mountainsides, wind, etc.). You may wish to have the children sketch their rock's "life history" from its origins to now.
Related Books:
The Pebble in My Pocket by Meredith Hooper and Chris Coady, Viking, 1996. ISBN 0-670-86259-2
Sylvester and the Magic Pebble by William Steig, Alladin, 1969. ISBN 0-671-66269-4
How Mountains Are Made by Kathleen Weidner Zoehfeld, Harper Collins Publishers, 1995. ISBN 0-06-445128-3
Stone Soup by Ann McGovern, Scholastic, Inc., 1968. ISBN 0-590-41602-2
Planet Earth/Inside Out by Gail Gibbons, Mulberry Books, 1995. ISBN 0-688-15849-8
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