Education Station

Well, here we are again, settling into the new school year!! We do so this year missing one of the stalwart of our counties educational outreach. If you have had Ray Mizenheimer in your classroom, as so many have year after year, you will be sorry to hear that he passed away this summer. He had been doing classroom, scouts, senior and industrial presentations for well over 20 years hereabouts and was very good at what he did. He was my mentor and will be missed by many in the coming years. We can’t replace Ray, but in the South County area, you still have Mitty Scarpato, (mittyscarpato@sbcglobal.net ) to help. I am not sure how far north she comes but T.O., N. P., Moopark and Simi are in her area. We hope to have someone for the North County soon with volunteers, but none trained yet.

We will be leaving next week on a trip to find you some good teacher samples for the Oxnard Show, coming up Nov. 17^th & 18^th, the week before Thanksgiving. We are going to the dumpsite of the famous Lavender Pit in Bisbee, Arizona first. It is due for reclamation next year, so all the azurite (blue), malachite (green), and turquoise will be lost. We hope to get some good pieces of the spectacularly

colored copper minerals for you. Then we will head off to the equally spectacular quartz crystal mines of Mt. Ida, Arkansas for a competitive crystal dig. I’ll bet you didn’t know that crystal digging was a sport! Hopefully, we will have some good samples for your personal sets and maybe a trophy for O.G.M.S!

Even if we found nothing, the show is shaping up as a good place for loot this year. We have the promise of a couple of hundred teacher’s kits from the Minerals Information Institute (http://www.mii.org/). If you have never been to their site, give it a look! They have a really good site for teachers. Most of the things on the site are free or very reasonably priced for teachers. It will describe the five packets we have for you to choose from at the show. If you have a rock box already or are getting one on loan from the library, their “newspaper” will give you a great forum for it’s use in the classroom and they send you free preprinted copies for next year if you send them back so they can see you are using them (http://www.mii.org/RockNewsAd/RockandMineralNews.pdf). Their History of Gold lesson plan (http://www.mii.org/pdfs/every/gold.pdf) and Mining Legends (http://www.mii.org/pdfs/legends.pdf )are really good as are many others. I use the Build a Volcano lesson plan with my Junior Rockhounds (http://www.mii.org/pdfs/volcano.pdf). You need extra hands when it comes to the gluing, but it is excellent. There will be a sign up sheet at the show to get information and lesson plans from these people. They have a good-sized budget and are very generous with teachers as long as you have a school address. If you don’t want to wait, you can sign up on their website. Lots of teacher freebees!

And for something so pretty you may want to take it home and frame it, we have some of the California Geological Survey State Posters. These have an 18 in. high crystallized gold (Calif. State Mineral) specimen in the center of a black poster with a Smilodon (State Fossil), Benitoite (State Gem) and Serpentine (State rock) arranged around it. Great for the classroom! Check out their website also. If you have a Calif. History or Earth Science conservation class, the pictures of historic gold mining, like the monitor washing away a mountain (http://www.consrv.ca.gov/cgs/information/publications/library/cd_98_001/a7195.htm or the historic gold mines in Calif. map is impressive (http://www.consrv.ca.gov/cgs/geologic_resources/mineral_production/Big_AUMap.pdf). Check out their Kid Zone Page (http://www.consrv.ca.gov/CGS/information/kids_geozone/index.htm) and Teacher Feature. The earthquake legends are interesting. We will have representatives from the Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, the Santa Paula Oil Museum (Which has its own Teacher and Kids outreach). Emma, our own rare mammoth found in Moorpark a couple of years ago will have a representative to talk to you and give you information. Who knows what else will be there for you and the kids.

As far as the Earth Science Kits, the BIG news is that the manuals are ready. If you have an Earth Science Kit at your school, you should have your manual in a few days! These are “ready to use” lessons, tried and true. They even come with Jim Brace-Thompson’s phone number, if you have any questions. It has a copy write to the California Federation, but in such a manner that educators are allowed to copy anything and everything you need to teach. It is in a binder format so that you can easily take pages out to copy for your classes. There should be a CD section in the back soon, when we can work some kinks out so that everyone can use them. We have SAGE Publications of Thousand Oaks to thank for sponsoring the publication of our manual.

There is also big news coming soon to the Library! In the last newsletter we mentioned that there is a rock box available for loan through the County Library near you. It is not available to the public, so you have to ask about it. You need to reserve it ahead of time. (It was out when I went by to check the samples last week.) The newest news is that the first supplemental kit, the General Fossil Kit should be available for you to check out before the end of the year. This is a smaller more compact kit, but contains a fossil from each of the 18 time periods. We are at present working on the documentation for it. This should be available to show at the Nov. O.G.M.S. Show and for checkout soon after. Another thank you goes out to Jim Brace-Thompson, the Author of our Manual, for this Kit. The man must never sleep! Right behind it is the Ventura County Fossil Kit expected to be ready near the middle of the Spring semester. This will have fossils that have all been collected in Ventura County – which you or your kids could collect!! You will be surprised at what we have for you. There is, also, a Minerals Kit and a Weather Kit being researched as well as a Supplemental Kit to go with the Earth Science Kit. The Supplemental Kit will contain hand lenses, streak plates (black and white) etc. for each school. These are going to be quite expensive and will need lots of donations from our fantastic supporters, like API and SAGE.

Our pictures, for this Newsletter are of a new find in the mineral world in a, already, famous location. Many were astounded when the first pictures started circulating on the email circuit this spring. There were lots of questions if these were “doctored”. They turned out to be true pictures. The miners that found these crystals work the area near Naica, Mexico for their lead and zinc deposits. These mines have been worked since the early 1900’s and produced the famous “Cave of Swords” selenite, which is a variety of Gypsum. These were found in the year 2000 but expect to visit them anytime soon. These are nearly 1000 feet down inside a working mine, whose owners are tired of people trying to get in. In any case the temperature is near 140 degrees and the humidity is 100%. The mine has to be continually drained to be viable for mining. Notice the orange survival suits in the calendar pictures. The fellow in street clothes was actually there for only 5 minutes before he bailed! These are some of the largest Crystals in the world at 36 feet long, but who knows what they will find next year? Isn’t nature grand?

If you would like to learn more check these out:

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/04/photogalleries/giant-crystals-cave/index.html http://giantcrystals.strahlen.org/america/naica.htm and the Calendar http://www.karl-heupel.de/bergbau/Mineralien/calendarionaica.pdf