Geology is Really Cool!!

So, I'm going to back up a little and do a little summary of what has happened in our lives in the past few months.

First, I'm going to tell you about this awesome unit study that we did.  I was at Thanksgiving Point in Utah walking through the gift shop looking at all of these amazing rocks.  I thought, I need to do a Unit Study with my kids on Geology.  I had this big plan unfolding and so many ideas coming to mind. 

With the Family School from Latterday Learning they have their subjects organized into units.  I saw the one on geology and thought, "This will be perfect". We had so much fun, we learned about the faults of the earth, the layers of the earth, tsunamis, earthquakes, how mountains are formed and finally about rocks. Even my 3 year old goes around looking at rocks calling them igneous or granite.  It was so much fun. 

As part of our unit study we do a celebration at the end.  For this I searched mines in our area.  I'm not from here, so I didn't know what I would find.  But, Lo and behold Nevada isn't called "The Silver State" for nothing.  There are tons of old silver mines. 

I told my kids we are going to an old silver mine.  It was called the Chollar mine.  An old couple that ran it thought it was fun to take my kids into this mine under ground.  My kids were scared, and so was I.  The tour guide at one point turned off the lights so that we could see how dark it was under the earth.  This was traumatic.  But, when we came out of this mine, we had a new appreciation for gold and silver and how much work goes into getting these things.  The workers had to work in sometimes 130-150 degree temperatures and then go into the ice room to cool off every hour.  I can't even imagine having to do this.  They didn't see the sunlight for days at a time.  It seemed surreal that people had to experience this to get these minerals from the earth. 

Then I remembered reading a book by Gerald Lund called "The Undaunted".  In this book it starts out describing the situation of families where kids had to work in coal mines in England from the time they were 6 years old.  Sometimes they would die because of how intense the work was.  I showed my kids videos of these kids working in mines and they felt really lucky for not having to work in mines and that they have the opportunity to go to school, even though we homeschool.  This was a great lesson and something I felt was important to realize. 

Finally, we did our presentations to share with our family.  We invited our cousins over to our house and each of the kids chose a rock or mineral to research.  This was actually quite fascinating.  I'm going to tell you a little about each presentation.

 Sophie did her presentation on opals.  She is 3 but always wants to be involved in everything and she loves to talk.  I showed her  her birthstone which is an opal.  She loved that the opal looked like a rainbow. 

My intellectual oldest son always wants to do something amazing and different.  So, of course he chose to do a power point presentation on Tanzanite.  He found that this stone is from Tanzania and was accidentally discovered by Tiffany's.  It's one of the rarest stones.  He wants to give his future wife a tanzanite ring.  Lucky girl!!!

J

Jayden chose to do his presentation on granite.  I helped him and we found some interesting facts about granite.  We found that it comes from The Rocky Mountains and Yosemite and other mountains.  In SLC, Utah we found that there is a granite vault where the LDS church stores all of it's information and records.  This is high security and it was pretty interesting to Jayden.  Also, we saw how the Salt Lake temple was made of granite brought down from the mountains and it took 40 years to build because of how much work it was to build the temple.  They also had to restart the building of the temple because they discovered that the foundation wasn't strong enough.  That was 2 years after they had already begun.  How devastating that must have been.  This was so interesting and fun to do.  I have a new appreciation for granite after this project.

Elise found out that one of her birthstones is Alexandrite.  She was very excited for this beautiful stone.  She found that this was discovered in the Ural mountains in Russia, and named after Alexander the first.  They thought that this was a different stone that had been mined in that area, but soon discovered that this stone changes colors.  So, they gave this stone a new name after the king of Russia.  She also says that she wants her wedding ring to be made out of Alexandrite. 

This sums up our unit on geology.  This was right before our summer break.  I'll try to post about our Summer break and then get to what we are doing at the moment.  So now you see that geology is cool!! What fun you can have learning about the earth.