Our Geology Unit!

When I asked our girls what they would like to study for science this month they chose Geology. I am always happy to feed their interests so a Geology unit worked for me! 

My goal was to complete this entire unit for free so my first stop was the library to look for our "textbooks". I chose:

The Magic School Bus Inside the Earth

Volcanoes

Rocks and Minerals

The Visual Dictionary of the Earth

Incredible Earth

I sat down one evening, looked through the books, and picked out the sections I wanted the girls to learn. I filled out our assignment sheets for the month and started planning our hands on activities.

We decided to cover the layers of the Earth, Earthquakes, Volcanoes,  Geysers, rocks and minerals.

 Our first activity was to learn the layers of the Earth. We found a very simple activity involving making a model of the layers of the Earth using playdough. We however did not have any playdough in the house so we first had to make homemade playdough. 

                                 

This was a very simple project that involved rolling out a new color of playdough for each layer of the earth and then placing them over the previous layer. The girls really enjoyed the entire project and were able to easily memorize the layers and then teach them to their siblings.

We of course HAD to make the prerequisite baking soda and vinegar volcano. The girls were thrilled when we got to this project. So thrilled they didn't even complain about having to cut out a million strips of newspaper.

We built our volcano around a small mason jar and coated the newspaper strips in equal parts of elmers glue and water. There was so much excitement over the volcano and the impending eruption that there was no waiting for the volcano to dry so we could paint it.  So after adding all of the newspaper strips we covered the volcano with strips of brown construction paper.

We placed 1/2 cup of baking soda in the jar and used approximately 1 cup of vinegar with red food coloring to trigger the "eruption". I am very glad I placed a towel under the volcano as it got pretty messy!





















You can find the links to all of our Geology Unit ideas on my pinterest board. I would love to complete them all this month however we have some very hands on History projects going on at the moment as well. I look forward to sharing those all with you very soon.

If you are completing a Geology Unit of your own I would love to hear about it!