COOKIE MINING

Today my 3^rd Graders became coal miners. Their job was to use the tool I gave them to mine the land and find as much coal as possible while doing the least damage to the land. They were given a chocolate chip cookie. The cookie represented a parcel of land that was going to be mined for coal. The chocolate chips represented coal. Then I asked students what happened to the land around the coal. We discussed what implications strip mining might have on local ecosystems. In general, surface mining takes away topsoil and vegetation and therefore destroys habitat for wildlife. We also discussed that fossil fuels are nonrenewable resources because they take millions of years to form and do not reform on the scale of a human lifetime. Cookie mining illustrated this fact because once they took the coal/chocolate out, there wasn’t any more to replace it.