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Children's Fun Sessions for use on science days or in museums

ELI Early years      
Earthquakes
Volcanoes
Rocks
Rock Cycle
Soils
Evolution of Life
Fossils/Dinosaurs     
Get rich quick
Natural hazards
Minerals
Continental drift
Earth in space
Geological time - visualising deep time
Oceans and seas
Out and about
Now let’s eat it!
Opengeoscience     
Cross-curricular     
Festive quiz

ELI Early years
•  Found in the ground: sorted!
•  Make your own rock
•  Fossil or not?
•  Dig up the dinosaur
•  Fossilise! - fossil game
•  Make your own soil
•  Changing state - transforming water
•  Watery world game
•  Gold prospectors
•  Pirates and buried treasure
•  Scary scorpions
•  Sensory treasure hunt
•  Rock Explorers
•  Rock builder
•  LegoTM bricks and sedimentary processes
•  Recreating the rocks
•  What colour was the world in the past?
•  ‘A World in a grain of sand’

Earthquakes
•  Quake shake - will my home collapse?
•  Shaken but not stirred?
•  Earthquake prediction - when will the earthquake strike?
•  Surviving an earthquake
•  Tsunami - what controls the speed of the wave?
•  An earthquake in your classroom
•  Modelling earthquake wave amplification
•  Earthquakes in art

Volcanoes
•  Blow up your own volcano!
•  Bubble-mania
•  Party time for volcanoes!
•  Take a ‘Chance’ on the volcano erupting
•  The balloon goes up at Krakatoa
•  See how they run
•  Volcano in the lab
•  Tsunami - what controls the speed of the wave?
•  Best classroom eruption?

Rocks
•  Found in the ground: sorted!
•  Make your own rock
•  ‘Rockery 1’ - rock game
•  What was it like to be there - in the rocky world?
•  Rock Explorers ELI Early years)
•  Design your own rocky play-park
•  From river sediment to stripy rocks
•  Rock grain cut out
•  Recreating the rocks
•  How do sedimentary beds form?
•  Make your own cross-bedding
•  Make your own sedimentary structures
•  Playground continents

Rock cycle
•  ‘Rockery 2’ - rock cycle game
•  The rock cycle in wax
•  Rock cycle at your fingertips
•  Cracking apart - physical weathering
•  Freeze-thaw - physical weathering
•  Rock, rattle and roll
•  Rolling, hopping, floating and invisibly moving along
•  Mighty river in a small gutter
•  Investigating small-scale sedimentary processes AND modelling mighty rivers
•  Changing coastlines
•  Dust bowl
•  Grinding and gouging
•  Why does soil get washed away?
•  Sand ripple marks in a tank
•  Sand ripple marks in a washbowl
•  Metamorphism - that’s Greek for ‘change of shape’ isn’t it?
•  Squeezed out of shape
•  Deformed trilobites
•  Blow up your own volcano
•  ‘Crystallisation’ in a pudding dish
•  See how they run
•  Unfair ‘build your own crystal’race
•  Volcano in the lab
•  Banana benders
•  Himalayas in 30 seconds
•  Valley in 30 seconds - pulling rocks apart
•  Margarine mountain-building
•  LegoTM bricks and sedimentary processes

Soils
•  Make your own soil
•  Soil doughnuts
•  Soil water shake test
•  Soil layers puzzle
•  Permeability of soils - ‘The great soil race’
•  Why does soil get washed away?
•  Darwin’s ‘big soil idea’
•  Questions for any rock face 3: soil
•  Is there life in this soil sample?
•  Where on Earth is no soil found?
Evolution of Life
•  Time-line in your own backyard
•  Toilet roll of time
•  Fifty million years into the future
•  How many Beany Beetles? - the evolution game

Fossils/Dinosaurs
•  Fossil or not?
•  Fossilise! - fossil game (ELI Early years)
•  What was it like to be there? - bringing a fossil to life
•  Meeting of the dinosaurs - 100 million years ago
•  Dinosaur in the yard
•  How to weigh a dinosaur
•  Let’s weigh that dinosaur!
•  Dig up the dinosaur
•  Trail-making
•  Scary scorpions
•  Sea shell survival and Trace fossils - burrows or borings
•  Shell shake - survival of the toughest
•  Ammonites: the ups and downs

Get rich quick
•  Riches in the river
•  Jigging>

Natural hazards
•  ELI Natural Hazards category

Minerals
•  Mineral or not?
•  Be a mineral expert 3 - the mineral foundations of everyday life
•  What is it made of?

Continental drift
•  Continental jigsaw puzzle
•  Wandering continents

Earth in space + festive quiz
•  Craters on the Moon
•  Playground planets

Geological time - visualising deep time
•  Counting to one million?
•  How many for a million?
•  Toilet roll of time

Oceans and seas
•  Fishing game - beware of overfishing
•  Lost at sea - the amazing journeys of rubber ducks around the world
•  Measuring the depths of seas and oceans: How is it done?
•  Modelling sea-floor mapping (with LegoTM)
•  Making waves: a storm in a teacup?

Out and about
•  Fieldwork safety
•  Earth science out of doors
•  Will my gravestone last?
•  Rock around school (investigating building materials)
•  Fieldwork: Applying ‘the present is the key to the past’
•  Fieldwork: Interactive re-creation
•  Now and then
•  The view from the site
•  Questions for any rock face - planning for fieldwork
•  Questions for any rock face 1: weathering
•  Questions for any rock face 2: erosion
•  Questions for any rock face 3: soil
•  Questions for any rock face 4: rock group (sedimentary or igneous)
•  Questions for any rock face 5: sedimentary grains
•  Questions for any rock face 6: fossils
•  Questions for any rock face 7: tilted or folded rocks
•  Questions for any rock face 8: faults
•  Questions for any rock face 9: metamorphic rock
•  Questions for any rock face 10: sequencing geological events
•  Questions for any rock face 11: tectonic plates
•  Questions for any rock face 12: potential of the quarry or cutting
•  Questions for any rock face 13: quarry economics
•  Questions for any rock face 14: recording geological data
•  Building stones 1 - general resource
•  Urban fieldwork
•  View to the future - and the past

Now let’s eat it!
•  Boring chocolate!
•  Does my rock hold water; will water flow through it? Eat the chocolate not the lego!
•  Swiss roll surgery
•  Modelling earthquake wave amplification
•  Folds and faults with puff pastry and chocolate

Cross-curricular (Arts and Science)
•  Geo-art: paintings to sculptures inspired by all things ‘geo’
•  Geo-literature: poems and stories inspired by all things ‘geo’
•  Geo-music - music inspired by all things ‘geo’
•  Earthquakes in art
•  Back in time
•  Rocks music

Opengeoscience
The following activities introduce Opengeoscience which gives you free UK geology maps. Also, if you have the apps igeology or igeology3D, the maps can be accessed from anywhere where you have a signal
•  Opengeoscience 1 - igneous intrusions and lava
•  Opengeoscience 2 - tilted and folded rocks

Festive Quiz
•  Bauble quiz - festive fun for everyone!