How to identify rocks using a nature guide

Last summer we went back to the Navajo Reservation with our kids.  One of the neat features about going is getting to see their handcrafts and buying some neat jewelry.  I bought each of the kids a handmade necklace, and this turned into a homeschool science lesson as we tried to identify the rocks used in each of their necklaces.

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Supplies for identifying rocks

rocks (in our case, these are polished semi-precious stones), rocks and minerals nature guide* (in our case we used the rocks and minerals playing cards* their grandparents had given them)

How we identified our rocks using nature guides

I’ll confess one reason I like using the playing cards is we can lay out all the possibilities to look over at the same time.  That just isn’t possible with a book, where you have to turn pages and flip back and forth.

First observe your rocks.  We noticed our rocks were a blue-green color and had some bits of brown in them.

Then we went through all of the cards in the deck and took out any cards that looked remotely like the rocks we had.

Next we looked at where the rocks were found.  We could eliminate several right off because they weren’t found where our rocks were from (New Mexico).

That got us down to two choices, and we spent a lot of time debating back and forth as to which one it would end up being.  But in the end we decided the blue green rocks looked like turquoise, and the brown rocks were molybdenite (even if spell check doesn’t think that’s a word, it is).

Want some more easy earth science or nature study ideas?

Then check out some of these ideas we’ve done before:

• Rock Cycle unit
• Nature Study for kids
• Layers of the Earth lesson