Rockin' the Rock Cycle

I do not know how the idea for this game popped into my head, but I am glad it did! The rock cycle is not a very complicated cycle on Earth however, some of the processes in it are difficult for students. With a cardboard box, a laminating machine and some Velcro dawned a new game!

I drew the arrows onto both sides of the cardboard.  I thought it was important that the two teams could not see each others answers.  I gave each team a list of words, the laminated paper boxes and then watched the thinking and problem solving commence! The teams had to decide where every word fit into the cycle. It was a lot of trial and error.  They had to talk through the entire process of how each rock type can change from one to the other.  If they noticed that the arrows didn't make any sense with their arrangement, they knew they had something wrong. What made this even more challenging for the students, is that each half is not exactly the same and not all of the arrows go in both directions.  I timed how long it took them to put it together, then put the times on the board to encourage competitions between the classes.  The team with the fastest time got some treats (ended up being around 10 minutes.)  I decided to put treats on the line so my earlier classes would not tell the later classes and give them an unfair advantage.  Here are some pictures of the students competing. 

Most classes I had were small enough that everyone had to participate with just the 2 sides.  This could easily be done with  4 teams and mutliple boxes if class sizes are too big.  When the students were finished they had a set of questions that they had to answer on Socrative.com.  This allowed for the losing team to finish and, give me some time to collect the data over how well they understood the objectives of the lesson. Overall took about 30 minutes to run the lesson.