Things to do:

Looking at Earth Rocks
1. Collect some rocks from around your house and school. Display them on a tray or inside an egg carton. Compare them to those that others in your class may have collected.

2. Label each rock with the location of where you found it. Number each sample.

3. Print out and fill in the Rock Chart to describe your rocks. Try to be as descriptive as you can. (You can create the chart on your own paper if you cannot print this one out.)

4. Look at each rock with and without a magnifying lens. See what details you can see. Try to describe what you found as you fill in your chart.

5. Classify your rocks as igneous, sedimentary, or metamorphic. This means you need to try to decide how your rocks were formed. You can find out about the ways these types of rocks were formed by visiting How Rock Were Formed at the Rock Hound site.

6. How are rocks on Earth collected? Visit the Rock Hound site to find out about tools that geologists on Earth use to collect their samples.

Now Think About Moon Rocks
1. Try to predict what Moon rocks will look like.

2. Visit the Moon Rock Collection sites and see how the Moon rocks were collected and what some of the samples looked like.

3. What types of tools did the astronauts use to collect rocks? This site will help you see the tools and read a description of them. Make a list of the tools the astronauts used. How do these tools compare to those used an Earth? How and why are they different?

4. How do you think the different Moon rocks might have been formed?  Were they formed in the same ways as Earth rocks?

5. Find out where the Moon rocks that the Apollo astronauts collected are now. Take a virtual Tour of the Lunar Sample Laboratory Facility Describe the area of the facility that you found most interesting.

6. What do you think scientists have learned by studying the Moon rocks? Make a list. Then see NASA's Top 10 Scientific Discoveries to see some of the items that NASA has identified.

Words to learn:

igneous
sedimentary
metamorphic
geologist
minerals