Mineral Investigations

We have been learning about rocks and minerals for the past couple of weeks.  Today we performed scratch tests on four different minerals in order to identify which mineral was quartz.  The kids were given two clues: 1) quartz is white and 2) it is the hardest of the four minerals.  The scratch tests were conducted with paper clips, pennies, and fingernails.  By simply scratching the four different minerals, we were able to identify quartz.  Tomorrow we will figure out how to identify gypsum, calcite, and fluorite!