Wednesday, November 30, 2011

Geodes

I decided to break out the geodes this week.  The kids really enjoyed cracking them open, though they were much harder to crack than I expected.  It turned out that most of ours weren't hollow, which explains why they were so hard to break.  Still it was a good excuse to go outside on one of the few non-rainy days and hit something.


The kids were thrilled to have a reason to don their goggles.  The littles love that I got them their own pairs.


Bang, bang, bang.  The towels we used to ensure pieces didn't go flying were totally destroyed by the time we were done with them.


Sam's was the first one to break.  It wasn't hollow, but he thought it was cool anyway.


Here I'm holding the pieces of one geode together so the kids can see how it would have looked inside.  This one was the most hollow one and had a funky bump inside.


This one split in many little pieces after not wanting to break at all.  We all though the colors were nice.  If you look at them closely under a magnifier, they had some neat crystalization.


This one had some neat color changes.  It reminds me of the big ones you can buy that are professionally cut.



We passed around magnifiers and inspected various pieces inside.


Here's a close up of that hollow one with the funky bump inside.

The kids really enjoyed breaking these open.  I want to see if the library has some books to follow up with and maybe take a trip to a gift shop that sells the really pretty geodes.

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1 Comments:

Jennifer said...

What a wonderful project for boys! I would love to do this with my little one. He sure does love his hammer. :)