Rocks and Minerals for Kids: How to Get Started

Looking for a fun hobby to introduce your kids to? Have you ever considered rock collecting? Rock collecting (or “rockhounding,” as many in the hobby call it) is very popular these days. I started rock collecting when I was about five years old and I’m still doing it today.

The first thing you are going to need to start a rock collection is a few rocks. There are two ways that your kids can start their collections: they can find them themselves or they can buy them from places like museum gift shops.

Finding nice specimens in the field is not as complicated as you might think. If you have a gravel driveway then that can be your first place to look. Look for anything that stands out from the other pebbles in the driveway and save it as a specimen. Another great place to search is a farm field. Every time a field is plowed a lot of rocks are heaved up with the soil and will just sit in the field until someone finds them or they are plowed back under. Just ask a farmer if you and your children can spend a few hours searching through his field. In most cases he’ll be more than happy to let you take some of those pesky rocks away. You can also search for public accessible rock-collecting sites on the Internet.

Now that you’ve found some places to go rock hunting you can start planning your trip. Your children will each need something to carry their rocks home in. A cloth bag works really well for this purpose. If some of the specimens are fragile you can wrap them in toilet paper to protect them from harm. You may also want to take a pad of paper and a pen with you so that you can record the name of the site if you want to remember that later.

Once you have found a few nice specimens and brought them home they may need to be cleaned. If they have any dirt on them your kids can scrub that away with old toothbrushes and soapy water. A note of caution: it is a good idea to test the rocks by wetting the corner of the specimen before cleaning them. Some rocks will actually dissolve in water!

After the specimens are cleaned you can store them. I use plastic beading boxes with twenty compartments each to house my collection. This keeps the rocks and their labels together (I will talk more about the labels shortly) and allows you to store them in a compact space. These boxes cost less than five dollars a piece.

Now it’s time to identify the rocks. For this you will need a good rock and mineral identification book. These books explain how to identify minerals using their color, the streak test, the hardness test, and a lot of other techniques. Such books are a very good investment. You may want to consider purchasing a fossil identification book as well, since your kids may find a lot of fossils.