Recreating the rock cycle?

Question

I want to recreate the rock cycle using some item that can behave as a rock. The purpose of this is to get a point across to my students about how really there is a reason why the rock cycle is called rock cycle.Most of them find rocks dull and uninteresting, so I was thinking about proving the rock cycle some other way. In a couple of hours researching I came across some surprising ideas, such as crayons, chocolates, wax, etc. I wanted some feedback on how well you think I can get the point across of the rock cycle being a cycle. To them, thinking that something liquid, turn into solid, then gets destroyed, and mixed into something else, then melted again, is really hard to understand. Using something that does not take millions of years to form might be a better strategy I think.

Answer 1

I think a food analogy is your best bet. I really like the chocolate idea. If you start with a bar of chocolate you can pretty easily run through the entire rock cycle.

If you start with a bar of chocolate (maybe chocolate with peanuts or cookie pieces in it, to represent crystals), you can call that an igneous rock. From there, you can crush/break the chocolate into little pieces and call that sediment. If you pile all the pieces together and then smash them together under pressure, maybe use a book, then you would have a solid block of chocolate made up of all the little pieces-- sedimentary rock! Then, you could heat it up a bit (in your hands, microwave) just so it's flexible and the bar has 'recrystallized' into a solid and show ductile deformation (metamorphic rock!) by bending it. Then, of course, you can melt it down into a 'magma' and let it cool back into it's bar form to make it an igneous rock again.

All of these steps can be done in any order, to show the full beauty of the rock cycle!!