Rocks & Minerals Cross-curricular Connections, Live Classes & Curriculum with a FREE Lesson!

How many of you out there both young and old love rocks and minerals? There is just so much about rocks and minerals to enjoy! There are many amazing cross-curricular connections that can be made while studying rocks and minerals.  My Fascinating Minerals A - Z live class is held in the fall, or you can purchase the Fascinating Minerals 8-lesson/unit study from any of NatureGlo's eScience clickable store links below. 

Here is a list of some of the great cross-curricular connections made with NatureGlo's eScience rocks and minerals live classes and curriculum.

1. Arts & crafts - resource links for making beaded jewelry
2. Art - drawing, painting minerals video tutorials from You Tube
3. History - creating a timeline showing how humans have used a particular mineral
4. Technology - researching how a mineral is used in the latest technology such as cell phones, computers, automobiles
5. Geography - Find the best localities in the world where a mineral is mined; finding the closest mines of an interested mineral near a student's local area. Mindat.org is a GREAT online resource to research this. Just type in any mineral in the Mindat.org search bar at the top of the web page. When the mineral's page comes up, scroll to the bottom for a world map and click on any of the pink crystals for mines with that mineral around the world!
6. Chemistry - experiments for growing your own crystals
7. Mathematics - finding out how much a rock or mineral weighs, it's specific gravity, it's Moh's scale hardness; looking up a minerals crystal system, which is a geometric study
8. Spelling - learning to spell rock and mineral names
9. Rockhounding - looking for rocks in the student's own backyard and local neighborhood parks, and or local quarries or mines is a simple and great way to get started looking for and collecting rocks

Can't join the live classes? You can look for the Fascinating Minerals A-Z mini course curriculum unit studies at my Teachers Pay Teachers store under the Earth Science tab, my CurrClick.com Rocks & Minerals Curriculum page and here at my Educents store!

You can check out any of my rocks and minerals live classes and HYBRID courses I have open for enrollment now here.

Click here to download your
FREE Minerals A - D unit study.

NatureGlo's eScience In-depth Rocks & Minerals Studies with Historic & Geographic Connections

Almandine in its host rock photographed by Eurico Zimbres from Brazil. A reminder of a beautiful, yet tiny garnet I once found also in its host rock in Dover Plains, NY in 1988.

I have such fond childhood memories of personal rock and mineral studies, especially after my 4^th grade teacher, Mr. Skeel did a short rock and mineral unit. After school, I can still remember going to my local neighborhood library in Tivoli, New York, and unprompted, checking out rock and mineral ID books just to get to know the minerals even better. The classroom short unit studies just weren’t enough information to satisfy my insatiable curiosity and desire to know all about them.

Broadway, Tivoli, New York where I found my first sandstone bivalve fossil.
The library I went to check out rock and mineral books as a girl was just up the street another block or two and on the right. I can see the beloved, old candy store, second building on the right. Hee, hee!

My personal studies led me into informal rockhounding that same year Mr. Skeel introduced me to the realm of rocks and minerals. On occasion, throughout my life, I have found some really great specimens while rockhounding. At 11 years old, while living in the village of Tivoli, New York, I made a spectacular find. After prowling around looking for rocks in our neighborhood kids favorite kickball rock-filled parking lot, I found a very nice palm-sized sandstone with several small seashell fossils embedded along the edge of the stone. I shall never forget my awe and amazement at having found such a treasure and kept it for many decades. While exploring a small rocky cliff along a highway, in Dover Plains NY, at age 13, I found a deep purple colored garnet in its host stone. Sadly, I have since lost both specimens, but they are locked away in the treasury called memory. Below are images that are not of my specimens when I found as a kid, but, likenesses of my original specimens.

This lovely sandstone with extinct bivalves gives scope for the imagination since it looks somewhat similar to my original piece found in Tivoli, NY in the 80's.

My greatest treasure hunt of all, thus far, was when I returned to my hometown, Ellenville, New York, at age 23 for the first time in my adulthood, to a place I call "Quartz Mountain". When I was 8 years old, my uncle Paul had brought me to this same place to look for little shimmering pieces of quartz crystals that were EVERYWHERE your eyes could fall. I can remember how amazed I felt at the ease of finding the little crystals all over that mountain as a girl. 

This is a large quartz crystal cluster from Ellenville, New York,
my hometown, photographed by Rob Lavinsky iRocks.com. My uncle Paul found a large piece like this, which he gave me.

Upon returning to Quartz Mountain at 23, I filled a decent sized leather satchel with hundreds of quartz crystals and a few nice pieces of mica and pyrite. With this loot, along with several magnifying glasses, and other rock collections, I was able to dazzle and keep many of my students entertained with hands-on rocks and mineral learning stations for many hours and years! Before I hit the road as a full time RVer in May of 2013, I had to squeeze my entire life’s possessions into a campervan. I relinquished those rock and minerals collections, including my hundreds of quartz crystals to a teenage boy in West Virginia who also had an affinity for them.

Today, I write and “collect” digital curriculum along with creating websites per subject with a web page per topic I teach. Here's the Rocks and Minerals website. The web pages include all I can find of the "best of the web" on the topic along with interesting projects and activities and videos. I've been working with adding interesting projects and activities to my Rocks & Minerals Pinterest board as well. This year we spent 1-hour per mineral learning about, diamonds, rubies, amber, pearls, a mineraloid, not technically a mineral, but one which I include in our gems study.  

When time allowed me this summer to go even deeper with each mineral, I found out some amazing historical connections, which of course, led to their geographic connections. And there is always the practical everyday uses of minerals and their importance in technology to learn about. Rock and mineral connections with other subjects can just go on and on including wonderful relationships with arts and crafts. This summer, I also began the first of a series of curriculum that now includes lapbook/notebook templates. Lately, the minerals I included lapbook/notebook templates with are silver, labradorite, and malachite. Here is a link to my rocks and mineral curriculum series (more coming soon) as well as my rocks and mineral live classes for middle/high schoolers. Younger siblings are welcome to join in the live classes as well and content is multi-age flexible.

Don't Miss CAMP GOOGLE!

Image by I. DeSouza.

Now Google has come up with yet another innovative idea! Google has partnered with Khan Academy, National Geographic (my heart throbs for NG) and the National Park Service to put on some fun summer camps for kids beginning......TODAY! Themes include oceans, space, nature and the physics of sound with music. It's called Camp Google. 

Today, July 13th at 12 p.m. PT,  Camp Google launched the camp with National Geographic diver Erika Bergman "taking kids" on a live dive in the Atlantic Ocean. I hope they recorded it as I don't see any recordings for it......at least not yet.  Maybe it will be posted on the above National Geographic link soon! 

This stuff is geared for kids but the content is appropriate for any age. I brushed up and even learned some cool new things about dolphins and echolocation as a science teacher. I love the simple use of recyclables too!

I'm especially impressed with Google Maps new ocean street map additions with the ability to walk the ocean floor thanks to the work of Jenifer Austin Foulkes, a manager with Google's Ocean Program, whom we see in the first Camp Google oceans experiment video, "Why Do Some Things Float?" 

Until next time, I hope you enjoy Camp Google as much as I am! 

Coral Reef Fish Math!

A Giant triggerfish and school of goldies photographed by Hein Waschefort

Last time I blogged, I had just published my very first EVER Marine Biology curriculum unit, Marine Fish of the World with Coral Reef Fish. I'm super duper excited about this unit not only because of it's colorlicious photography (thanks to SO many amazing photographers offering their work to Creative Commons so long as we attribute their name to the photos) and cool vintage black and white graphics in the public domain, but, because my research on the colors and patterns of coral reef fish, more specifically triggerfish, was very satisfying. Teachers love learning too. I have so much fun digging deeper into topics that textbooks never have time for. Why wouldn't it be a priority for students to derive mathematical connections from some of the most colorful creatures on the planet, coral reef fish? 

Let's have a look at some of the fun colors and patterns of coral reef fish along with a few snapshots from my marine fish unit.

Hands down, my most favorite coral reef fish, and fish in the world.....and likely unarguably the most colorful fish in the sea........................

A mandarinfish from the Munich Zoo, Hellabrunn photographed by Jenni Douglas

Tadaa! The mandarinfish! This week I taught my first Marine Biology summer eWorkshop lesson on JUST the mandarinfish. I'm sorry that the class is not up anymore, but once we CurrClick teachers start a course, the enrollment comes down. BUT, check out my cool mandarinfish resource page here. 

How about that, now! An entire 1-hour eClass JUST on the mandarinfish! The students loved it! Just take a moment to look at and admire all the wonderful colors and patterns you see on this graceful fish. Check out a video of it from the mandarinfish resource page (scroll down to the videos) to see just how graceful and lovely they really are! 

I see a remarkable cobalt blue, which is unique to this fish since it's produced by it's nude skin's cellular pigment. Yes, it's a nude, scale-less fish in the Dragonet family composed of over 180 other species! I CAN'T WAIT to dig deeper and research the other colorful family members. The video from my page entitled, "Mucky Secrets - Part 9 - Mandarinfish & other Dragonets Lembeh Strait" (scroll down to the first video beneath the Informative Videos heading), shows a few of the other Dragonet members including the mandarinfish. Notice the waved lines that look like a child's marker drawing. How about the converging lines on the fins, lovely yellow spots and concentric purple and red rings around its eye! All of these patterns I described, are studied in higher maths. Why not bring more beauty into the mathematics curriculum both for young and old?

And now for our finale........the triggerfish!

Clockwise top to bottom: Unicorn Leatherjacket Filefish, White-Banded Triggerfish, Queen Triggerfish, Rough Triggerfish, Black Triggerfish. Image in the public domain.

It's a vintage image, one of my favorites. The artist really captured the unique ovoid body shapes. 

The Orange-lined triggerfish photographed by janderk and released into the public domain.

Just look at and admire those outstanding orange stripes! Below you'll see parts of the marine fish unit with the exercises for observing colors, patterns, numbers and shapes in the triggerfish.

Students study the diagram above and use the fish's external anatomy in their mathematical descriptions in the exercises below.

A slide from lesson two, Introduction to the Coral Reef Fish PowerPoint

And yes it does have a red tooth!

You can check out the rest of the preview of the Marine Fish of the World and Coral Reef Fish from my Teachers Pay Teachers store! Just click on Preview beneath the unit's cover image.

The Marine Fish of the World with Coral Reef Fish Unit IS FINALLY HERE!

She's finally ready! After hours, days, weeks....no months, of research and writing, the Marine Fish of thee World with Coral Reef Fish unit has arrived! She's composed of three PowerPoint lessons, each with an accompanying activity guide. Here's the cover I designed for it.

You can have a look at the curriculum here on sale at half price from $8 to only $4 at my CurrClick Home page and at my Teachers Pay Teachers store here. Both give a good description of all that's in the unit instead of me re-writing all that here.

So, of all marine biology topics, why fish? What's so special about fish? According to this nifty little pdf poster (also found on my marine fish pinterest board), not only do they supply immense entertainment among aquarists and amateur hobbyists, are beautiful to look at in the wild (if you have the opportunity to snorkel or scuba dive) they provide a whopping $25 billion dollar food industry! How many of us rely on fish as a part of our diet? And $9 BILLION is made in reef ecotourism PER YEAR of folks coming to look at FISH too! Fish are really important to us. Unfortunately, the oceans need a major serious clean up job, of which I'm hoping for deeply to happen in the Ocean Cleanup project for started by young Boyan Slat, a Dutchman. The dear oceanic community is under seige, mostly....by human activities, of which I won't belabor here.

I hope you enjoy all the fun freebie resources I have for this unit. Even though I use the unit for my online middle/high school classes, the unit can be appreciated by students of all ages. Yes, even you adults. I've my marine science pinterest board loaded with 53 (at the time of writing this) UNIQUE, and I do mean, unique, fascinating, interesting art projects, activities, experiments and resources about these rather remarkable creatures that many of us just deem as food. Remember in Finding Nemo, when the sharks had their AA meeting and repeated over and over..."Fish are friends, not food!" Well, this unit doesn't really get into fish cuisine (although I enjoy some good healthy fish choices every so often myself) as much as it does their personal lives. And we do get personal by looking at some of their internal anatomy. Enjoy the unit, if you'd like! 

Also, have a scroll through NatureGlo's eScience Marine Biology Virtual Library, Marine Fish resource page here. 

Resuscitating this Blog Starting with a Post about My NEW Upcoming Marine Fish Unit BUNDLE!

Oh, my! I'm delving back into the world of blogging for education! For the past two year's I've been maintaining and putting my blogging energies into my full time RVing traveling blog here. I wish I could just transfer all that information over here to Blogger, but, it's beyond my skill level. Well, I could copy and paste the posts, and I may just do that, but, I digress.

Now, it's on to an additional adventure of blogging about my latest and greatest curriculum and online classes for NatureGlo's eScience! My latest venture is publishing a BIG unit on marine fish. Here's the current cover below which is probably going to change a bit. I think the title needs to be more easily read from a distance. So, yes, lots of learning curves aiming to improve the quality of my work, yet not allowing it to look like every other teacher's on Teacher's Pay Teachers. Wish me luck and I'll be posting more about my marine fish unit soon!

In the mean time, have a look at all the lovely and free resources for the unit I've gathered over the years here at my Marine Biology Virtual Library, Marine Fish resource page. I try to assemble the best of the best of web resources and FREE project and activity ideas for each of my many lessons! Okay, now I had better go work on publishing that marine fish bundle!

Thanks for reading!