Students learn rocky lesson

Andrew Edwards

Peering through magnifiers and sharing observations, fourth-graders

at Huntington Seacliff Elementary School took a closer look at the

world of rocks and minerals on Jan. 22.

Splitting off into pairs, children in Kristen Burda’s class

examined a set of 12 rocks, including glassy black obsidian, red

sandstone and bright white marble. Without being told the names of

the various rocks, Burda’s students took notes on each sample’s

color, appearance, texture and hardness.

Samples included “rocks that we never see,” 9-year-old Jeffrey

Kang said.

The lesson was part of a lengthy six- to eight-week lesson that

requires the class to think like scientists as they try to figure out

how to classify and identify different kinds of rocks.

The unit is designed to teach students “inquiry thinking, where

they discover on their own,” Burda said.

As the class learns more and more about rocks, the discoveries

will be placed on a large bulletin board with a picture of a volcano

rising from the Earth’s crust.

The students, equipped with rulers and magnifiers, quickly set to

work as soon as they had a set of rocks to investigate. For some in

the class, taking a good look at rocks to find out what makes each

kind different was a new experience.

“I’ve never really looked at rocks this closely,” 9-year-old

Catherine Wippler said.

In some of the samples, students observed small details, like

glittering flecks of mica or fossilized sea shells that most might

not notice without taking a careful look.

“Some of them had little crystals and some looked like they had

fossils,” 9-year-old Meera Midha said.

In the limestone samples, children found tiny shells that many

years ago belonged to small sea creatures. Rocks like these, the

class learned, are called “fossiliferous” by scientists.

The class also took notes on how each rock felt compared to

others. A piece of gneiss is “rough and sandy,” 9-year-old Luke

Lindsay said.

“You can, like, rub it off,” Luke said.

Before putting away their rocks and science tools to take a math

test, students were able to differentiate between rocks.

“I found out that there’s lots of colors in rocks and none of them

are like each other,” 9-year-old Griffin Camps said.