Chocolate Rocks

Lesson: Science

Class: Y3 Year: 2020 - 2021

The Year 3 children have been learning about rocks and the rock cycle. To help show how rocks are formed and how the rock cycle works, some children at home and those in school made chocolate rocks. It was a lot of fun and very tasty.

Here is how we demonstrated the rock cycle :

Step 1 - Create some magma by melting all of the chocolate. Allow it to flow, like lava which has erupted from a volcano. Allow your lava flow to cool so that you have a solid igneous choc rock!

Step 2 - Expose your chocolate rock to the harsh conditions of the Earth’s surface, or in this case, a cheese grater! Erode your rock and turn it into chocolate ‘sediment’. Your sedimentary rock will be made up of three different sedimentary layers: chocolate sediment, cocoa pop sediment and marshmallow sediment. 

Step 3 - This step requires a little more imagination than the previous steps. You cannot add enough sedimentary layers to generate enough heat and pressure to alter our ‘sedimentary rock’. We need an oven to do this for us. Fold the mixture and this misshapen feature looks quite a lot like those found in metamorphic rocks.

Step 4 - Enjoy your chocolate rocks.

Here are some pictures of some of the children at home and in school.