Today is Rocks and Minerals Co-op Day. The kids learned so much. Here is what we did.

I have spent the past few weeks in the co-op building up the science notebook foundational skills. We have covered the researching skills of locating sources, ciring/bibliography of those resources, and the many ways that notes can be taken and organized. They have worked on how to write an informal lab write up. Today, they had to put all of that together in use in one day.

Today we focused on the Chemical section of the Rocks and Mineral E-notebook.

The kids began by doing research in the three fundamental areas for this section: Crystal Lattice, Metal vs Non-Metal, and the Chemical Groupings of Minerals (only the top 5). They will have to use proper MLA standards for citing their resources, so they had to take note of where they found their information. That is a hard thing to remember to do sometimes.

They worked as a team, gathering their notes onto a group wiki. That was a good test of the wiki system in Moodle at The Virtual Homeschool Group Website. The kids were in three groups, each team researching individual parts of the topic and adding the notes for their topic to share with the whole group. Here are some pictures of them at work (click on the thumnail if you want to see it bigger):

You can see their notes (though they will continue to expand them) at http://www.virtualhomeschoolgroup.com/vhsg/mod/wiki/view.php?id=1622&page=groups&thankyou=1

None of the kids did an undigested copy/paste notes (Yay! I hammered that one home). It will take some experience to get to where they have a knack at organizing information on the fly without a pre-organizer. But that is to be expected. It will also take time to get the feel for boiling down a resource to basic facts, how to record them without wasting to much time 'compositioning them' , and when to quote and cite. Practice is the key to those skills. We will get plenty of that. LOL.

I wanted to bring Zachary and Maria in to the activities more today. I have a copy of 3-2-1- Classroom contact. The older kids used the episode to practice taking notes from a video source while the younger ones just enjoyed and absorbed information in a form they would respond to well. One of the scenes in the video is of the girl being a molecule with specific shapes that are then made into a crystal lattice. This was an important scene for the little ones because they would become our models to do this for the e-notebooks.

Kid crystal latiices are a fun way to illustrate the concept. Zachary and Maria loved being the 'center of the show' as they posed as molecules. They made a 4 point molecule, a 3 point molecule, and a two point molecule. Only one of the kid crystal lattices are done so far. Here it is:

To see the image full size, just click on it. I will post again so you can see the other two kid crystal pages once they are done.

After the kids finished the posing and photography for the lattices, we all went inside to do the crystal lab.

First, I reainforced what crystals were with hands on time with the family rock collection. During that time I was able to get some general review in too. 

Then we began the lab itself. I opted to do the sugar crystals because not only would the kids get to enjoy watching them grow over the next few weeks and months, but all that patient observing would come with the tasty treat of getting to eat the crystals in the end. It also gave us the opportunity to revisit the characteristics of a mineral. One of which is that it can only be a mineral if it in inorganic. They know from biology co-op over the sumer that sugar contains carbon and therefore is organic. That helped them to realize that the lab was somewhat akin to making a model of a mineral.

I will let the kids speak for themselves about how they did the lab. They will be posting their lab write-up pages (to their learning journals) after they have finished them tomorrow.

All in all a busy and productive day. They are using the skills they have been using, getting content knowledge in, and had lots of hands-on opportunities. A good co-op day.