While eating lunch the other day, my youngest child casually asked, “Mom, why are there like 30 coffee cans full of rocks in the laundry room?”
I had to laugh.
Oh, the memories I have of rock collecting….
As most parents can relate, very few, if any, trips to parks or even just walks outdoors with young children result in returning home with all sorts of “treasures”.
For my family, it usually evolves around rocks.
One day, early on in my parenting years, I had taken my daughter’s jeans down to the laundry room to wash them. Of course, as I was emptying her pockets, I found a handful of rocks. I tossed them into the coffee can that I had placed right next to the washer for this very reason.
I came back upstairs and found my 2 boys squabbling over something silly. I’m not sure why the thought hit me, but I went back down to the laundry room and came upstairs with 3 coffee cans full of rocks.
I dumped them out on the table and the children just started sorting them into different piles, with no direction from me.
I watched and realized they’d sorted them by color.
It struck me that rock collecting could become a hobby for us and an educationally creative outlet for me.
Rock collecting has many benefits and I am going to share some of those benefits here:
*Time outside: exercising, hiking, discovering new places
*Family bonding time/activity
*Organizational skills
*Can become a lifelong hobby–rock tumbling, polishing, jewelry making, etc
*May find some hidden treasures: fossils, minerals, arrowheads, or maybe even gold
*Might recognize some rock names from Minecraft
*Will take you to streams, rock shows, geology museums, and even caves
*Creativity–how/where to display(This year we are going to shy away from coffee cans and evolve into displaying them in a fishbowl, my son’s idea)
*Discussion of history as you study your finds
Some other ways to add even more enrichment to your rock collecting adventures are to:
*Research your local area to find what minerals and rocks are in your geographical region
*Join a local geology or mineral collector’s club
*Journaling–write about where they went and what they found
*Catalog finds
*Difference between a rock and a mineral
*Geodes
*Vocabulary
Plus, did you know that September 16th national rock collecting day?
What a perfect time to kick off your own rock collecting adventure!
