The Carbon Cycle Game

Grade Level:  Elementary

Objective:  Students will learn about the carbon cycle through an engaging hands-on board game.

My good friend Anna, who works for an environmental education non-profit in Las Cruces, New Mexico is visiting me in Holden Village.  This week I've had the great pleasure of watching her teach and instructing alongside her.  Today she designed a game to teach about the carbon cycle.

Rules:

Each student is given one to two "players" on the carbon cycle game board (for example: deer and human, atmosphere and soil, rocks and water.)  For each "player" a student receives, he/she also receives 10 pieces of "carbon" (we used foam circles to represent carbon.)  Arrows on the game board show who receives each "player's" carbon using large arrows (3 carbon) and small arrows (1 carbon.)  On your turn you can chose which of your arrows you want to follow, for example, a deer can give carbon to the soil through decomposition, the atmosphere through respiration, or to a human through consumption.  After two rounds, we flipped the game board upside so the kids could practice remembering where their carbon went without the visual of arrows.  After three rounds, we all tallied our carbon, placing the pieces in the appropriate place on the game board.

The kids noticed how much of the carbon had ended up in the atmosphere and Anna used this observation as a way to talk about the greenhouse effect and climate change.  She directed everyone's attention toward the large arrow between humans and the atmosphere--"combustion"--and explained how combustion had increased over the past century, shifting the balance of carbon in the cycle.  Anna ended by empowering the kids to make better decisions than the generation of adults before them, using their knowledge of the carbon cycle to care for their ecosystem. 

Washington State Content Areas Covered:

EARL 1: System

Big Idea: Systems
Core Content: Role of Each Part in a System
Students know that:
-A system is a group of interacting parts that form a whole. Give examples of simple living and physical systems (e.g., a whole animal or plant, a car, a doll, a table and chair set).
-A whole object, plant, or animal may not continue to function the same way if some of its parts are missing. Predict what may happen to an object, plant, or animal if one or more of its parts are removed (e.g., a tricycle cannot be ridden if its wheels are removed).*
-A whole object, plant, or animal can do things that none of its parts can do by themselves.
-Some objects need to have their parts connected in a certain way if they are to function as a whole.
-Similar parts may play different roles in different objects, plants, or animals.
Students are expected to:
-Explain how the parts of a system depend on one another for the system to function.
-Contrast the function of a whole object, plant, or animal with the function of one of its parts (e.g., an airplane can fly, but wings and propeller alone cannot; plants can grow, but stems and flowers alone cannot).
-Explain why the parts in a system need to be connected in a specific way for the system to function as a whole (e.g., batteries must be inserted correctly in a flashlight if it is to produce light). -Identify ways that similar parts can play different roles in different systems (e.g., birds may use their beaks to crack seeds while other birds use their beaks to catch fish).