By Natalie Bazinet
Staff Writer
LIMESTONE — Since the beginning of the school year, elementary students of the Limestone Community School have been having fun learning about rocks in multiple literacy-theme events.
Aroostook Republican photo/Natalie Bazinet
Literacy teacher Renee Parente engaged students in rock layers using different flavors of gelatin to represent various rock types.
Last month’s literacy event featured an edible geology lesson (which the students ate right up), story time featuring two different version of the classic tale Stone Soup and a musical lesson, during which students sang songs about rocks and used rocks as percussion instruments.
Coordinated by Literacy Teacher Renee Parente, each event aimed to provide students with a fun, feel-good day that everyone could participate in regardless of skill or age level.
Through the edible geology lesson that Parente was able to coordinate with the help of Collette Thompson with the University Maine Cooperative Extension, students studied sedimentary rocks through the different colored layers of a gelatin mold.
Each color represented a different layer of rock; when Parente asked kindergarten students what they thought the suspended fruit in the red gelatin layer, might represent, prompting that it was something that paleontologists look for, one excited little student preemptively yelled “strawberries!” but quickly changed her answer to fossils.
After students learned about how rocks are layered, they got to make their own cups of layered rocks filled with colored gelatin; after the lesson concluded, students enjoyed their rocky dessert.
As much as kids love desserts, Parente said that the edible geology lesson was tied with story time as the students’ favorite activity.
“Our students really enjoy being read to,” she explained.
Keeping with this year’s geology-themed literacy endeavors, the students have one more elementary-wide Literacy Day coming up once the snow melts, and Parente is already thinking up some ideas that rock … like a potential rock Olympics.
“The rocks have had good staying power, they’ve proven to be a simple, earthy, economical item that have provided lots of fun learning material,” Parente explained.
