Week 2: Is it a Mineral?

This week I will show various items from my home and what minerals are in them. I started looking around trying to find out what the examples of minerals I would use, and I discovered that there are SO many! Mostly everything I found has some type of mineral in it. Here are my examples.

We have a lot of pencils at our house for homework, and as we learned this week pencils contain graphite. Graphite is soft and utilizes the physical property of streak to be able to write on paper.

We all have batteries and toothpaste in our houses. Batteries contain Lithium, Zinc, and Manganese. Toothpaste contains, Calcite, and Limestone. Minerals in toothpaste vary based on different types of toothpaste. I knew that toothpaste had Limestone in it, so when I researched it I was able to learn more minerals that it has in it.

This photo shows my Quarrz countertop, Quartz in itself is a mineral and I picked out this mineral as a countertop because of how resilient and tough it is.

You may not be able to tell from this picture, but this is a picture of my wall... I wanted to point the drywall and it has Gypsum in it.

This is an opal that my husband has, I was able to tell that it is an opal based on its color, luster, and smooth texture.

This is a quartz rock with Mica in it. Mica is flaky, and a common color is green, and the crystals are hexagonal.