I am assisting in a STEM University for local youth - 4th & 5th graders. One segment will be on geology. The kids will be cycling through in groups of about 12. We will be doing some rock identification and will be borrowing some lab kits from a local college to do a Mohs hardness scale activity.
We are looking for a few more hands-on activities that the students can do in about 15 minutes or less. Crystal growing is an obvious choice, but it takes hours or days. The activity can be anything from plate tectonics, caves, volcanoes, geysers, fossil formation or whatever is related to some aspect of geology. We prefer something the kids can do themselves rather than having an adult stand up front doing a demo, but even that would help. What are your ideas?
Do something paleontological. Kids are fascinated with fossils, etc…
I remember in college, one of the most strange and fascinating things was to try and identify or at least determine some characteristics of various animals by their coprolites. (fossilized turds).
Maybe something similar might be cool. Or maybe something like a “guess where the rock formed” kind of thing, with rocks from a very fine grained siltstone (slow moving/still water), to some kind of conglomerate (faster moving water). And so on…
A great exercise would be to collect rocks and identify them using a variety of tests. Hardness, reaction to acid, color, density, etc. May not be as exciting as studying volcanoes but it teaches them the scientific method.
When I was twelve, they gave each of us a slab of Indiana limestone guaranteed to contain at least one fish fossil. Then they gave us dissecting probes and told us we had two weeks to uncover our fossils. Pretty cool.
Don’t know what kind of budget you have for this, but years back I bought some small baggies of gravel from the Lee Creek phosphate mine. They contained dozens of tiny shark, ray, and drum fish teeth (among other less identifiable fossils.) I originally bought mine directly from a personal web site, but there is something similar on Amazon, and if you dig around (so to speak) you could probably find more sources.
And here’s some direct from the Lee Creek/Aurora museum. (They don’t list the volume/weight of the bucket for some reason, maybe you could contact them and get an answer.)
Put a small ball of clay in a disposable bowl. Write the student’s name on the bowl. Have the students use a shell or something similar to make an impression in the clay, then fill the impression with plaster of Paris to make cast and mold fossils. Let the fossil sit to dry a bit while the student does some other activities. The plaster will pop pop out after it fully dries at home. This will be a nice little keepsake, too.
Have students stack two or three unwrapped Laffy Taffy candies on top of one another and press down hard - sedimentary rock. Then they can squeeze the sedimentary rocks in their hands until the heat and pressure turn them into metamorphic rocks.