RMSC DELIVERS: Rocks and Minerals

RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your School

This outreach gives the student a hands-on understanding of geology. Igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary rocks are explored. Through experimentation, along with the observation of color, streak, luster, and the use of the Mohs hardness scale, students are able to identify a variety of minerals.

Subjects: Earth Systems
Program Type: RMSC Delivers: Experiences at Your Site
NYS Standards:

• 3-LS4-1 Analyze and interpret data from fossils to provide evidence of the organisms and the environments in which they lived long ago.
• 4-PS3-2 Make observations to provide evidence that energy is conserved as it is transferred and/or converted from one form to another.
• 4-ESS1-1  Identify evidence from patterns in rock formations and fossils in rock layers to support an explanation for changes in a landscape over time.
• 5-PS1-3 Make observations and measurements to identify materials based on their properties. 
• MS-LS4-1 Analyze and interpret data for patterns in the fossil record that document the existence, diversity, extinction, and change of life forms throughout the history of life on Earth under the assumption that natural laws operate today as in the past.
• MS-ESS1-4 Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence from rock strata for how the geologic time scale is used to organize Earth’s 4.6-billion-year-old history. 
• MS-ESS2-1 Develop a model to describe the cycling of Earth’s materials and the flow of energy that drives this process

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