edHelper.com
National Parks and Monuments
Geography
The Petrified Forest



The Petrified Forest
Reading Level
     edHelper's suggested reading level:   grades 4 to 6
     Flesch-Kincaid grade level:   5.78

Vocabulary
     challenging words:    illegal, sediment, solution, spite, imagine, interesting, disturb, perhaps, however, numerous, million, cell, died, record, rocks, remove
     content words:    Triassic Period, President Theodore Roosevelt


Print The Petrified Forest
     Print The Petrified Forest  (font options, pick words for additional puzzles, and more)


Quickly Print - PDF format
     Quickly Print: PDF (2 columns per page)

     Quickly Print: PDF (full page)


Quickly Print - HTML format
     Quickly Print: HTML


Proofreading Activity
     Print a proofreading activity


Feedback on The Petrified Forest
     Leave your feedback on The Petrified Forest  (use this link if you found an error in the story)



The Petrified Forest
By Kathleen W. Redman
  

1     Imagine that you lived almost 300 million years ago in a large basin area with numerous rivers and streams. All around you are trees as big as nine feet across and two hundred feet high. There are ferns and many other plants all along the rivers and streams.
 
2     As time passed, the giant trees died. Some might have been knocked over by floods or wind. Pieces of the trees floated down the rivers. Some trees were left on the land along the rivers. Some of them were buried in the mud. Most of the trees decomposed. A few of the trees were petrified into beautiful "stone trees" we can see today.
 
3     Some logs were buried by sediment from the rivers and ash from volcanoes. They did not decompose. Ground water mixed with the ash and dissolved the silica in it. Then the mixture was carried through the logs. The solution filled or replaced cell walls and crystallized as quartz. Minerals rich in iron mixed with the quartz and created a beautiful rainbow of colors.

Paragraphs 4 to 5:
For the complete story with questions: click here for printable


Copyright © 2009 edHelper