Comments (13)

By Mom Unplugged, March 30, 2008 7:29 pm

It has been a week full of rocks during Spring Break at our house in Albuquerque: a trip to Petroglyph National Monument, climbing over big rocks on a mountain hike, choosing pretty tumbled rocks to buy at the Natural History Museum gift shop, collecting rocks in the courtyard.

So, although I didn’t realize that we would be so into rocks this week when I chose the Unplugged Project theme last Sunday, it has been an excellent week for a rock project.

My son was too busy with his new Legos this week to care much about projects, but my oldest daughter wanted to make her own petroglyph. The children have both recently studied petroglyphs at school and I think that Petroglyph National Monument made a big impression on them.

We found what we thought would be a suitable flat rock (note: if you try this, make sure you choose as soft a rock as possible), and used a hammer to break a piece of it off to use as a chisel. We were trying to be authentic!

My daughter drew her design on the rock with a pencil. She was trying to reproduce one that we had seen at the Monument.

She then scraped the rock with the other rock to engrave the design.

Well, this proved to be slow going (the rock was not soft enough), so she got fed up and moved on to authentic Native American method number two: the Dremel Tool! My husband supervised this step and the petroglyph was quickly completed.

In case anyone is interested, here’s another fun rock idea that we once did: cracking open a geode!

Other petroglyph resources:

+ Draw your own rock art printable

+ Hawaiian petroglyphs to print and color

+ Info about petroglyphs: Petroglyphs.us

+ Fun art project: Sandpaper Petroglyphs

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If you joined us for the Unplugged Project this week, please leave a link in Mr. Linky, as well as a comment in case Mr. Linky fails at his job. If you didn’t join in, please consider taking part next week!

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Next week’s Unplugged Project theme will be:

Books

Hope to see you then!