By ANDREW WIND, Courier Staff Writer

WATERLOO --- Dave Franklin lugged a bag bulging with large rocks, but it wasn't enough.

The teacher from Harding Middle School in Cedar Rapids broke away from the group of two dozen educators and began digging through a pile of rocks. He needed to find some good examples for his earth science students back home.

"Plus, I can't walk by a pile of rocks without picking up some of them," he said.

Franklin and 23 other kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers spent an afternoon earlier this week wandering Basic Materials Corp.'s Wagner Road sand plant to learn about its operations and collect rocks. It was part of an intensive week-long University of Northern Iowa workshop called the Geology of Iowa. The teachers came from across the state to study Iowa's geology through field trips and classroom activities.

Sherman Lundy, a geologist with Basic Materials, said the sand plant, located along a backwater of the Cedar River, is an ideal place to find fossils and igneous and metamorphic rocks. The slough became a rich depository of such rocks when it was part of the Cedar's riverbed in glacial times.

Igneous rocks, such as granite, are formed by intense heat below the earth's surface. Metamorphic materials, such as marble, are formed from igneous or sedimentary rocks exposed to heat and pressure.

"By and large we don't have igneous and metamorphic materials in Iowa," said Lundy. "You need to come to some place like this that will allow you to access those materials."

And getting rock samples to show their students was an important part of the day's activities for many of the teachers. Franklin was looking for easily identifiable igneous and metamorphic rocks.

"We had lots of boxes of rocks at school, but no real clear cut examples," he said. "I've got seventh graders and I can't have tricky ones."

Franklin picked up a squarish black metamorphic rock with a white band bigger than his fist as an example of what he wanted. "They get heated until they're soft and it tends to line things up," he said, of the white band.

Carol Boyce, an expanded learning teacher at Orange and Kittrell elementary schools in Waterloo, said she found a lot of geodes and fossils in the sand plant's rock piles.

The fossils she collected will get a lot of use in the classroom, especially in her fourth grade curriculum. "But it is also good for kindergarten, teaching hands-on science," said Boyce.

In one activity, she has students sort the fossils, deciding how to classify them. Students were then allowed to each take one fossil home.

Beth Heller, a teacher with the Northeast Hamilton School District, hoped the UNI workshop would broaden her spectrum of understanding about the state's geology. "I want to gain some more knowledge about geology to incorporate into my middle school classes," she said.

Lawrence Pisarik, a teacher at Cascade High School, said the workshop was a good way to refresh his background as the Western Dubuque district considers reintroducing earth science in its curriculum for a greater emphasis on the basics. And he was finding all kinds of rock samples.

"This is a pretty good mix," he said, surveying a mountain of rock. "Glacial till is a mixture of local rock and rock brought down from Canada by the glacier."

The teachers will take materials they collect back to the classrooms to identify the types of rock and the processes that created them.

"If you don't understand the processes, then you don't understand how the rock was formed," said Lynn Brant, a professor from UNI's department of earth science helping to lead the workshop. "The processes that went into making and rearranging the materials is important to making the rocks."

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