Help for a student science teacher

[Mrs Z]

I am a student teacher who is currently writing a series of lesson plans for a year 9 science class and I'm covering the topic mineral mining. I was wondering if anyone had any exciting experiments or resources which would make this topic more interactive and interesting? or anything which has worked really well in your classroom? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Unregistered]

I do an amazing experiment with my 9 science class which everyone enjoys. The experiment is called muffin mining. The students are placed into small groups and are given two chocolate chip muffins. The muffins represent two mine sites. Each muffin contains 3 chocolate chips placed in a line down the center. The students are given toothpicks and must cut the muffins using two different mining techniques (open- cut and underground tunneling) to mine the 'ore' (chocolate chips). The students then have to rehabilitate their mines using butter to stick the muffins back together. This clearly demonstrates the two mining processes and allows students to identify similarities and differences.

This link is not to the exact experiment i conduct but it is similar: http://nesen.unl.edu/Lessons/Geosphere/muffinmining.asp
Hopefully you find this useful.