Unit Plan

Unit Plan

Part 1: Rocks VS Minerals. What is the difference?

• Activity: Make a cookie, lego demo

• Assessment: Rock vs mineral guessing game/Exit card

Part 2: Minerals

• How to tell minerals apart. (Mineral testing - Colour, Lustre, Hardness, cleavage, streak)

  • Activity: Try out the different tests on some common minerals (Streak, magnetic, hardness)

  • Assessment: Mineral ID. Test out different minerals to find what they are.

• Common Rock forming Minerals (Quartz, Mica, Hornblende, K-Feldspar, Calcite) See Slides.

• Uses of minerals in our everyday lives

  • Activity: Mineral Use Bingo

  • Assessment: Mineral use game, Creative writing - What would happen if you didn't have minerals in your life?, Mineral Use Worksheet

Part 3: Rocks

• The 3 Rock Types - Formation (Rock Cycle). Video.

• How to tell the rock types apart locally

  • Activity - ID some rocks students have found as sedimentary, igneous, or metamorphic.

• Common local examples of each (Limestone, slate, granite, Diorite, Gneiss). What minerals are in each?

• Stories rocks tell us (Indigenous Stories, Evidence of travel, Erosion, water, or heat in its history)

  • Activity: Sort rocks based on smooth vs rough, big mineral size vs small, and light vs dark. Each of these tells a story about the rocks history.

  • Assessment: Have students create a rock story in dramatic form, creative writing, or a comic. The story can be based on a rock they found, have, or supply the students with a box of rocks or pebbles. Have them ID the rock, then with the knowledge of the rock cycle, and evidence of its form, create a story of how it got there.

Part 4: Human Use and Impact

• Mining and its impacts.

  • Activity: Chocolate Chip Cookie Mining (in Slides above)

  • Assessment: Costs and Benefits of Mining (In Slides above)

• Canada's Natural Resources - What R+M do we produce?

  • Activity: Explore ArcGIS mineral map of Canada, Mineral of Canada Poster (Both in Slides above)

• Early Society Uses of Rocks/Minerals

  • Explore some of the ways early societies use Rocks and compare it to today.

  • Activity: Listen to some rock stories from indigenous nations across turtle island

  • Activity: Traditional Games you can play with your class. Have students make up a rock game

  • Activity: "Cave Painting" with sidewalk chalk (more details in slides above)

  • Activity: Guess the tool (In slides above)

  • STEM Activity: Make a stone tool with found objects in your schoolyard/greenspace (See slides)

  • Assessment: Venn Diagram on uses of rocks and minerals past and present