If you live in a city or thoroughly developed suburb, most of the rocks you find in your neighborhood were brought there by people. The rocks may have arrived in 40-pound bags of landscape stone to decorate yards and gardens or in dump trucks to make streets and parking lots.
This web page supports an activity we presented at the ESCONI Juniors booth at the 2024 Earth Science Club of Northern Illinois (ESCONI) Annual Show. The activity challenged children to learn to identify 6 common neighborhood rocks and then take home free samples of the 6 rocks for their collections.
Below is a PDF version of the Neighborhood Rocks Identification sign that was displayed at the activity. You can either look at the PDF online or download it to your computer or cell phone:
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ESCONI Juniors’ Neighborhood Rocks activity was based on a since-retired website developed by Eric Gyllenhaal more than 20 years ago. The website was called Neighborhood Rocks, and you can still visit it at the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine by following this link: https://web.archive.org/web/20040813172706/http://www.saltthesandbox.org/rocks/index.htm
The internal links on the old Neighborhood Rocks website still work, but links to many other old websites don’t work any more. You can use some of those old internal links to learn more about the rocks collected during this activity. Click on the rock names to access those links:
Nature Collector's Garden and Nature's Swap Shop 