We went digging for gems at Western Maine Mineral Adventures in Oxford County over the weekend with the kids' 4-H club.

Basically, the site owners do the hard work by providing the mining work already. Visitors to the quarry area fill a bucket of dirt and rock mined from the area quarries to sift through to find the gems.

The kids didn't mind the digging work at all.

Afterwards the kids sifted small amounts of dirt and rocks from their bucket through a screen.

Then dipped the screen into a tub of water to rinse off the remaining dirt before dumping their booty on to the table to sift through and look for the gems.

All the kids found some kind of tourmaline (black, green, pink and watermelon) but most were very small pieces.

But it turned out that one of the older boys in our group found a large piece of green tourmaline and was told it was worth quite a bit of money (over $500 for sure, with the guess it was really worth much more than that).

The trick of digging for gems is knowing what you're looking at. For instance feldspar comes in a bunch of different colors so identifying it isn't always so easy. The kids found a lot of feldspar that they liked and thought they could make jewelery out of it along with the tourmaline they found.

My girls had fun peeling the mica apart - there was a ton of it in the area.

G. got tired of looking for gems (she had a full baggie of them) so she decided to make designs with the smaller rocks on her table.

And we found that once you start digging it's hard to stop. Fino was as enthusiastic about the activity as the kids.

There was a poster with some of the more common gems found at the site. The kids found an example of each of these displayed the day we visited.

See more photos from the trip

Digging for gems with L.