Year 5 were learning about renewable energy and they first looked at fossil fuels and their effects on Earth.
After discussing what fossil fuels were and looking at the ways in which they affect our planet, children pretended to be miners and extracted ‘coal’ from their chocolate chip cookies. They carefully observed their cookies (Earth’s crust layer) during this process to see how it was being altered. Their task was to extract the chocolate chips wholly, whilst trying to cause minimal damage to their cookies. Children used their cocktail sticks to dig around carefully to loosen the ‘soil’. Then, they traced around the chocolate chip carefully and collected them on the side. At the end, we have had some perfect mining as well as some disruption to the landscape around. Children then discussed how their mining caused damage in various ways, including crumbs spreading, dust flying and pieces of ‘rocks’ bouncing around with the force from their cocktail sticks. There were interesting findings that concerned wellbeing of humans, animals and plants around mining zones.