DAY THREE: Geodes Galore!
Welcome to our “Rocking Rock Research! – An Amazing DIY at Home Camp” series. For Day 3, we focused on oh-so-cool geodes! We read through and watched a few online videos, created some snacks, painted some geodes, and performed a science experiment. Read on for more details!
A TYPICAL DAY
All kids are different and you can definitely vary your day with whatever works for you 🙂 But the gist of our day having our kiddos focus on some work books or online learning tools in the early morning, an intro to the day’s theme after they were done, some videos around lunch time, and themed activities (reading time, writing time, crafts, food crafts/snacks, and games or experiments) in the afternoon. Feel free to pick and choose whatever works for you 🙂
INTRO
Many of the books from this week touch upon geodes, but we also picked up a National Geographic Break Open 2 Geodes Kit. (We had a few geodes from a previous party, so we didn’t need too many. If you’re just picking up a kit, it might be worth splurging on the set of 10 or 15 since cracking geodes can be quite fun!). Inside the kit, there is a booklet that gives a good intro into geodes. For our intro into the day, we looked at some of the geode pages from the other books this week as well as read through the booklet in the kit.
WHAT TO WATCH
For our video of the day, we watched a brief 5m video from JTV on how geodes are formed: All About Geodes and How are they Formed. It’s not a cartoon but still easy to follow for younger kids.
FOOD CRAFTS / SNACKS
For our themed snack of the day, we had planned to create some edible geodes using a tutorial from steampoweredfamily: Candy Geode Kitchen Science. Unfortunately, we ran a bit short on time 🙁 Maybe next time!!!
READING
It’s no secret that reading helps prevent that summer slide. Some even say this is the most important. For our intro, we did a bit of geode-centric reading by examining the booklet. For our reading time, we picked a more general book on rocks (it had pages on geodes but other rocks as well). It was too pretty to pass up 🙂
- A Rock Is Lively by Dianna Hutts Aston
WRITING & WRITING PROMPTS
Just like reading, writing helps prevent that summer slide by both encouraging their creativity but also their motor skills and penmanship.
If you’ve got a little one, have them trace words related to the theme: ROCK, GEODE, CRYSTAL…
If you’ve got older children, have them write a sentence or two up to a page or two (depending on their age). Encourage them to be creative AND give reasons for why they made certain choices.
- Imagine you were on a secret mission to retrieve as many geodes as possible without breaking them. How would you check which were rocks and geodes?
CRAFTS
For our craft of the day, we followed a Watercolor Geode activity from kidspacemuseum. It’s super easy – all you need is some paper, watercolors, and salt! We used water color pencils & mini canvases from the Dollar Store, but you can definitely use any other watercolors and paper on hand. The kids definitely liked this one 🙂
STEM ACTIVITY
For our science activity, we – of course – had to break some geodes!!! Again, we picked up a National Geographic Break Open 2 Geodes Kit but also had some other geodes on hand. Since you’ll need a hammer, you will want to supervise younger kids or do the actual breaking yourself. But otherwise, cracking geodes can be a bit addictive and is super fun when you see the actual crystals inside!
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for checking out our at home play / summer camp guide! If you enjoyed this article, please let us know what you think in the comments below and/or follow us on Pinterest.
Also, if you haven’t already, check out some of our other at home play / summer guides: DIY Summer Camps.
Happy Learning!
