Curious Crystals

Learners carefully look at four known household crystals. After observing and describing the crystals, learners are given an unknown crystal, which is chemically the same as one of the four known crystals but looks different. When learners realize that they cannot identify this crystal by its appearance alone, they will suggest other tests and ways to compare the crystals to eventually identify the unknown crystal. The related activities are examples of tests learners can conduct on the crystals. After a series of these tests, learners will gather enough evidence to identify the unknown crystal. [Activity is publicly available through a web crawler capture on Archive.org. Activity write-up only, images are unavailable.]