Atoms

When Nissa looked down the barrel of a microscope for the first time she found herself much closer than a stone’s throw to a chunk of granite she picked up along the creek. "Wow. I see lots of blurry things. And I see some pink stuff and white chunks too," she began telling me.

Nissa strained her eyes even more as she looked at the piece of granite shining in the bright sunlight on the microscope’s stage. She tried to focus on the different shaped structures jutting up in all directions from the surface of the stone. The fuzzy outlines of black sheets and milky white slabs of something began to clear as she turned the focus knob. It looked like they were advancing toward her eyes. "Now I see thin sheets of shiny stuff," Nissa told me. “I wouldn’t like to be hiking along that stuff. There’s no water even. It is all dry and rocky.” She turned to me and asked, “What is that black shiny, sheety stuff? It looks slippery. I could slide down it real easy.”

I looked into the microscope and told her, "Yes. That is very slippery looking. That is mica.”

“I see lots of that stuff and some milky kind of pieces and salmony colored pieces," she went on as she peered into the microscope again..

“The salmony pieces are the mineral feldspar, potassium feldspar. The milky pieces are feldspar also, but they have a different mineral in them."

"Feldspar? What does that mean?" she asked as she peered down the barrel once again.

“I see chunks of white stuff. And I see chunks of gold stuff. Is that the fool’s gold?”

“Yes. That is what fooled the miners over one hundred and fifty years ago. Notice how the gold chunks look like they are caught in the chunks of whitish stuff? That's quartz.“

“Yeah. It looks llike they are stuck to the quartz.” Serene brought the specimen up closer to her magnifier and peered through its lens as if peering through a window at a jewelry store. “The gold pieces look slippery to me. Everything looks dry too. I would not like to walk along those quartz chunks. They look sharp on the ends.”

"Hey, my stone has lines in it. It looks like layers of caramel pudding and layers of vanilla pudding." I went over to Jill who was examining her stone with a hand lens. We shared the view and noticed the stone was much more tidy than the other stones we had seen with Chance and Nissa. "Look," Jill offered, "this stone has layers of different colored stone in it. And it flakes off with my fingernail."

" We are going on a treasure hunt." I gathered the children together and gave each one of them a magnifying lens and a small bag to hold treasures. "Here is a map and a compass too so you can find your way to the treasures."

"I'm going to find a bunch of treasures. Maybe I will find a treasure for my mother," Nissa told Jill.

"And maybe I will find a wishing stone," Serene spoke softly. "My mother says that a wishing stone is like a Chinese fortune cookie. It brings you good luck."

Nissa looked at my treasure map, following the blue line with her eyes. She looked up, then down at the creek bubbling beside her several times before she told me "This map shows the treasure over there somewhere on the other side of the creek. But we have to find the bridge first then cross over the creek." She looked at me to make sure I was in agreement.

"So," I began, "we walk northeast along the creek. And we will come to a bridge and cross it. Then we will turn south and walk along the creek for a ways." I kept guiding her eyes with my finger on the map. "If we look to the west, though, we can see a fallen log. And the treasure is behind the log. Do you see that on your maps children?" After they all agreed, we began walking slowly, northeast along the creek. It wasn't long before Joshua stopped and picked up a round, perfectly spherical stone. "Hey, this is a punk rock," he mumbled to himself. "I wonder what is inside of it. Can you chop this open for me?"

"Yes." I took my hammer and began pounding on what looked like a lava bubble of a rock. A geode. But it began to break apart too easily to be a geode. When it finally split open, I rotated one face toward the sunlight.

When Serene came over to me she couldn't gather her words fast enough. "I am going to take this one home with me." She grabbed the rock away from my hands with such aggressiveness I thought her to be Chance for a moment. "It has more sparkles in it than I have ever seen in my whole life." She held up the broken piece of rock and announced, "It's my Christmas stone." As she watched the thousands of pieces of mica sparkle in the sun she confided, "This stone makes me happy. Those sparkles look like little fireflies caught in the stone," she told me, tipping the stone this way and that. "Watch it sparkle!"

“Maybe this stone was once a star!" I looked up the creek in silence. Serene shot a glance up at me then looked up at the sky then down below at her stone. "Yeah, a falling star,” she muttered in a small churchyard whisper.

Nissa and the other children quickly scrambled up the embankment to join Chance who had already found the jewelry box I had filled with treasures. They landed on their knees looking like they were kneeling before the story of the world. Structure. All there was was structure. "Wow. Look at the treasures." Nissa took a handful of treasures out of my jewelry box and began putting some of them into a nearby glass bottle while Joshua examined a piece of quartz with his magnifying lens. "Hey, this gold in here looks like little gold blocks. It looks like they are stuck to short fat white sticks or something."

"Let's take a look at those sticks under our microscope after our treasure hunt." I suggested to him. Jill and Joshua crammed as many treasures in their pockets as they could while Serene took a piece of rose quartz and put it in her pocket.

"Come children. Let's go back to our microscopes and take a close look at our treasures." I told them.

"A fire stone?" Chance asked as he shoved a small rock up to my face..

Stop here! What have we observed so far? Think about what we just observed. Rocks and pebbles are a great opportunity to examine structure. Structure has information in it that can tell you many things. When the children examine a rock by using a microscope, they at once see crystals, conglomerations of colored minerals, tiny clumps of sparking matter that are invisible to the naked eye. For the first time, they see tiny shapes in a rock that are smooth, jagged, spikey. Seeing structure under the microscope invites children to speculate on how that structure got into a rock. And, they naturally wonder how did the rock get here in the weedy field, the playground, the park, the creek, the forest? One of the ironic results of this kind of microscopic investigation is that it seduces children to think of grand things that can't be seen with a microscope; grand things like floods, glaciers, and volcanoes; large pieces of land such as alluvial fans, valleys, plains, shorelines and marshes. During this experience with children, think small and big at the same time! If you are able to pull this off, children can become very intrigued. They may even come to think they can examine whole volcanoes if they only had a big enough microscope! Move over Leeuwenoek! Satellite technology is here! We can now see whole glaciers, alluvial fans, and marshes and plains, whole shorelines and valleys just as easily as you, Mr. Leeuwenoek, could see spores, wiggling amoebas. We just used light to look the other way!

“There's something I don't understand about stones." Joshua's mother came over to me and began picking up nearby stones.

"Don’t understand about stones?" I waited anxiously to hear what she had to say..

"Well," she began, "where's the energy? If nature is saying, 'between us two there is nothing between but energy and information ' then, where is the energy? Obviously the information is what the stone feels like, how it feels to the child, what color minerals are in it, what it's crystals look like. Things like that. But where is the energy?"

“Come, come up to the lesson area where I keep my fire," I answered. "We will be leaving in a few minutes."

"Your fire? What does fire have to do with anything?"