Materials needed:
- Jell-O (4 different flavors with distinguishable colors)
- Cool Whip
- Raisins, sliced almonds, fruit snacks
Age Range: 4-7 years (preschool & kindergarten)
Concepts: geology, paleontology, fossil formation, age of the earth, scientific discovery
Introduction:
On a recent vacation, while walking along the beach with my daughter, we noticed layer upon layer of horizontal stripes in the nearby cliffs. Although I attempted to focus my daughter's attention on this phenomenon, she was far more interested in the shells, rocks and sea animals washed up on the shore.
Back home, and hundreds of miles from the ocean, I noticed her examining the rocks in her school's parking lot. Scattered among the rocks in the lot were a number of stones containing fossilized shells. We discussed her observations, and I asked her to think about the following:
- How did the shells get inside the rocks in the parking lot when your school is so far from the ocean?
- How old are the fossils? Is there any way to determine their age?
- Why do only a few of the rocks in the parking lot contain fossils?
- Is there any connection between the stripes in the cliff at the beach and the shells you found in the parking lot?
Getting a five year old to think about these concepts is difficult at best and requires creativity and an element of fun. Thus, we headed to the kitchen to perform an experiment. We were going to see if we could simulate the layering of rock and study the formation of fossils.
Procedure:
Our technique involved using Jell-O and Cool Whip to form a model of the geological layers, and raisins, nuts and fruit snacks to simulate fossils.
Our first attempt to produce fossils met with little success. This was interesting because in nature, as in our kitchen, the conditions necessary to produce fossils rarely occur. The problem, we realized, was that the Jell-O was too hot when we added the fruit snacks, which caused them to partially disintegrate. Apparently we did not create the correct conditions for fossilization.
Our first attempt also did not produce the layered effect we had observed in nature. Due to the flavors we chose, our layers were too similar in color and, therefore, difficult to distinguish. What we needed was greater variation in the material that was being laid down, and better conditions for "fossilization."
We found that by cooling the Jell-O for 1 hour in the refrigerator and beating Cool Whip into the cooled mixture, we could create distinctive layers that more closely resembled the cliff we observed at the beach.
Next, we refined our fossilization technique. We used slivered almonds and raisins as our surrogate animals and placed them into the Jell-O just as it began to set. This time our fossils stayed intact. We reasoned that this must be similar to natural fossilization, where hard shells and bones are much more likely to survive the process than softer parts such as skin and muscle.
After we successfully created our geological layers we used a "boring tool" to extract a "core" sample. In reality our boring tool was a plastic tube taken from a party blow out, but it served its purpose well. I explained to my daughter that real geologists use core samples to study the Earth's layers.
After taking the sample and inspecting the layers, I asked my daughter which layer she thought was the oldest. "Oh, that's easy!" she exclaimed. She remembered that we made the red layer first, several days ago, and she saw that the red layer was at the bottom of our core sample. Ah ha! That means that the layer at the bottom must be the oldest! Pretty cool, huh? But what if turned the bowl upside down? Could that ever happen in nature? What could possibly turn a whole slice of the Earth upside down?
Conclusion:
With simple tools and common materials from our kitchen, we simulated the layers of the Earth and the conditions necessary to produce fossils. We now understand why fossils rarely occur in nature. I knew the activity was a success when my daughter exclaimed, "Ooh I found a fossil!" as she helped herself to a spoonful of our experiment.
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