Technically Invisible

The story we are reading this week in Reading Street is a biography about a man who loved to collect rocks.  As part of our routine to activate prior knowledge and make valuable connections, I took the students on a virtual field trip to visit a geologist.

<<follow me, here>>  My brother Eric is married to Jocelyn.  Jocelyn’s dad, Sheilds Flynn, is a geologist who lives in North Carolina.  He travels all over the world acquiring mineral specimens and has a website where he catalogues them and offers some for sale.

We visited his website today, and these were some of the things that surprised our students:

🙂 “The colors of the rocks and minerals were so bright and different.”

🙂 “Some of the specimens were so small – like the size of a cubic centimeter!”

🙂 “The rocks and minerals came from all over the globe – Greece, Afghanistan, Namibia, China, Ireland, Russia, etc…”

🙂 “It’s expensive to buy some of them!”

The level of excitement and interest today in reading was obviously high, and your child should be able to tell you lots about what we saw….  Later in the day, Shields sent me a reply to the email that I sent him earlier in the day… here it is:

Hi Suzy,

Thanks so much for your email and visit to our web site.  I hope that it proved to be useful to the students.  Should there be any students that would like to pursue the world of minerals any further a great web to visit is, www.mindat.org.  This web site is populated with mineral pictures by people all over the world and is probably one of the most comprehensive reference databases on minerals available on the internet.  All the mineral photographs are put up by individuals around the world.   For example if you type in a mineral name, like emerald, it will take you to the area of the database where you can display pictures of emeralds from all parts of the world, and you can do this for the name of any mineral.

Hope spring is not too far away for you folks as I know it has been a particularly difficult winter.  Hope we catch up with you at some point during the year.

Shields

If you visit any of the websites above, leave a comment so we know what you saw!  SO FUN!!

Friday, March 11, 2011 —

Watch the video below of Alden sharing his collection of rocks with the class on the document camera:

After Alden’s show & share, Mrs. Asendorf brought in a piece of West Falmouth Pink Granite for each of us to keep — she told us a story about how Jacqueline Kennedy requested that JFK’s gravesite be created from the beautiful stone…  The Chamber of Commerce Fact Sheet says….

The Laurentide ice sheet left behind two types of notable till, or glacial debris: basal till, which is carried along on the underside of the glacier, usually compact clay; and residual till, which is what remains when a glacier melts and retreats. Residual till is often recognizable because it comprises primarily a distinct type of pink granite carried from the Maine coast, 150 miles to the north. Called “West Falmouth Pink Granite,” this stone was quarried in the early 1900s for building purpose, particularly in West and North Falmouth.

Here’s a link to an article related to JFK:  http://www.capecodtoday.com/blogs/index.php/2008/03/16/today_in_cape_history_granite_from_cape?blog=161