Cracking Open Geodes on a Beautiful Day!

We bought this awesome "Crack Open Geodes" kit at the Science Museum last Friday. It only cost $10 and I knew the boys would love it!

Luckily the weekend brought amazingly warm weather, so we headed outside to see what types of treasures we would find.

If you are planning on buying a kit like this, let me warn you of something first. There is no guarantee that you will have crystals in all of your rocks. There is a chance they will be hollow ugly rocks. Please don't let that stop you! The experience alone is worth the $10!

This particular kit comes with 10 rocks and a cracking bag for "safety". The bag sucks. Within a few hammer cracks it already had huge holes in it. Use an old sock, it works much better.

The boys each got to choose out 2 rocks, we were stingy and picked out some for ourselves as well.  

It was time to start cracking! According to the directions you are supposed to hit the rocks with a hammer gently until it cracks in half. Ha. That makes me giggle. It doesn't work that way, trust me. Just hit the rocks until they break...

 We got pretty lucky. All but 2 of our rocks had a pretty decent amount of crystals in them! We all were extremely excited to see what each rock would bring. I was probably the most excited and I am not ashamed to admit that!

This is where the embarrassing part comes in. The LAST 2 rocks we thought to ourselves. "Hey, maybe a chisel would break them cleaner." Uh...Der. It does. So use one. 

According to the research I did AFTER we used this kit, you are supposed to use a chisel and lightly tap a line all the way along the middle of the rock and than cleanly break it open. Yeah...we didn't do that.

Even though we didn't follow those directions, the couple we did use a chisel on turned out pretty good. 

We ended up with some pretty neat rocks. I love them and can't wait to buy another kit. I wanted to research them and how they form, but the boys wanted to play outside. Sigh. Curse you nice weather!