Our team took a survey of our 4th and 6th grade students.  Our goal was to see what kids knew about rocks, minerals, and gemstones before and after they had studied them.  In our school, the fourth grade didn't have their unit on rocks and minerals yet, and the sixth graders had it in fourth and fifth grade.
      We found that many students collected rocks or minerals at some time in their lives.  These collections were usually kept in boxes, bags, or on furniture in their rooms.  Most of the time the kids didn't try to find out what kinds of rocks they had in their collections.  They didn't seem to have a good way to display their 'finds'.  Visit our rock and mineral collecting page for ideas on how to start your collection!
     One question asked the students to identify the rocks or minerals that they would recognize if they saw them in their driveways.  We were interested to see that Halite was not a recognizable word to them because very few kids said they would know it if they saw it.  Halite's common name is salt.  We thought this was kind of funny.

    When it came to birthstones, an equal number of the 4^th graders both knew and didn’t know which ones were theirs.  When the students took the survey, some of them thought that they knew what their birthstone was, but when we compared their birth month to their choice, we found out that a lot of them were wrong!  

     The last conclusion that we drew from our survey was that mostly all of the students in the 4^th and 6^th grade think that the study of rocks and minerals is a good subject. We hope that our website helps kids across the world and that they end up liking mining as much as we do!