Rocks and Fossils Workshop
Rocks & Fossils
Fantastic resources and well-planned activities which fully engaged the children and were very relevant to the curriculum." Year 3 teacher Tiffield School.
"Your collection is truly wonderful and the range of activities excellent." Science Co-ordinator, Barnes Primary School.
Get hands-on with rocks and fossils, soils, and geological equipment in this workshop. Examine, compare and group a wide variety of specimens. Investigate the properties of rocks, and their uses in our everyday lives (KS2) or their role in the rock cycle (KS3). Learn how fossils get inside rocks, and what they can tell us about prehistoric life. We can also examine thin-sections of rocks under the microscope, rock-forming minerals, and weathering of rocks.
The workshop covers KS2 topic "Rocks & Fossils". For KS3, the workshop can enrich studies of the rock cycle, resources, environmental changes of the past, and can be combined with other workshops (eg. Go Mapping, Geochallenge).
Children work in groups and rotate around a series of rocks and fossils "stations" during the workshop, each one with a theme, eg.: colours, textures, grains, crystals, weathered rocks and soils, things made from rocks, etc.
In your own classroom or school hall you will experience a wide variety of specimens to touch, compare, measure, and examine with cue cards to prompt discussion and discovery. There are also a worksheets to fill in.
In this Rocks and Fossils Workshop don't forget to look out for: a rock that contains metal, a rock that can be used to make toothpaste, rocks that can burn, rocks that have been squashed flat, rocks made in a desert, a smelly rock (has oil inside), a salty rock (yes, you can lick it), rocks from a volcano, and much more.
Can you spot which type of creature your fossil is? ..... or which body part? We begin to "think like a palaeontologist" and try to work out what these fossil clues tell us about past life. What did they eat? What ate them? How did they move? How old are they? Activities include: fossil sand-brushing, fossil sorting, fossil drawing, fossils ID, dinosaur footprint matching and various other activities.
The fossils in this workshop include shells, bones, ammonites, trilobites, belemnites, dinosaur fossils (teeth, bone peices, eggshell fragments, fossil poo), sharks teeth, fish skeletons, insects, sea urchins, leaves, wood, a mammoth tooth, corals, mammal bones (woolly rhino, bison). There are also replicas of rare or valuable fossils including: dinosaur bones, skulls, horns and claws as well as mammal bones and teeth (eg. sabre-toothed tiger), and amphibian skeletons. There are rocks and fossils worksheets to fill in, and we end with a Q & A session on rocks, fossils and soils..