My mom and brother were playing Castle Keep in the living room. So I thought it would be a good time to play with my brother’s magnets. I was walking down the hall and dropped a magnet. I saw a piece of a rock and I thought it was a piece of the magnet because it looked like it.  I looked all over the magnets and none of them were broken.  But I put them by the magnet and it stuck, and I realized it was one of the rocks from the back yard and that we had a lot of them in the back yard.

I got my magnets and waved them around the rocks in the back yard and found tons of them. I asked my mom if I could borrow a small jar to store them in. I asked her if she knew what the rocks were.  We decided to do a science experiment because we both did not know the answer.

1. Discovery – Rocks have magnets in them.

2. Discovery – These rocks do not stick together.

3. Assumptions – They must have something on them or in them that is metal.

4. Research – What is in it? What kind of rock is it? How are magnets made?

We went to the computer to look up how magnets are made. They are made from hot steel and when they cool down they turn into magnets.  Then we looked up what kind of rocks these are we found out they are minerals. A test to find out if a rock has magnetic minerals, if it does, it is most likely called Magnetite.  We found out that it does not have metal in them, rather it has a mineral in them. 🙂   It is not Chromite because chromite is red and our rocks are black.  

Note from Mom: Magnetite is an oron oxide mineral and has a hardness of 6.  You can go here to see more.