Middle School Inquiry Lab on Fossil Fuel Distribution
In this lab students will study the geoscience processes that helped create fossil fuels, and how those fuels were distributed across the Earth. Students will try to predict and model where fossil fuels may be found.
Each inquiry lab will contain an essential question that will drive the lesson and make students think. For this lesson, the essential question is:
- What geological processes form fossil fuels, and where are fossil fuels found?
BACKGROUND INFORMATION AND MATERIALS LIST:
Students will begin the lab by reading the essential question and background information. This can be done individually, as lab groups, or as a whole class. If you consider lab groups, you also might include some type of whole class formative checks before digging into the lab.
Materials List:
- map of Pangaea
- colored pencils
PROCEDURE:
For this lab, students will complete two sections to help them predict where oil is distributed across the Earth. In the first part of the lab, students study a map of Pangaea and indicate, with two different colors, where items like coal and oil were formed.
For the second portion of the lab, students cut apart the Pangaea map and make it look as much like the modern-day Earth as possible. Students then indicate where the formation of oil and coal could be during present day. When complete, students check their maps with the answer key provided.
CONCLUSION
Students will go back to the essential question and write a CER (Claim, Evidence, Reasoning) to conclude the lab. Once completed, students will reflect back on their learning by answering the following questions:
- How is coalification similar to the way oil is formed? How is it different?
- Why is oil sometimes found far from oceans?
- In what ways were your predictions correct? In what ways were your predictions incorrect? Can you explain why?
MODIFIED AND INDEPENDENT INQUIRY VERSIONS
All of the Kesler Science inquiry labs come with three different modification levels. Each lab is differentiated using the icons below.
STANDARDS ALIGNMENT
NGSS: MS-ESS3-1 – Construct a scientific explanation based on evidence for how the uneven distributions of Earth’s mineral, energy, and groundwater resources are the result of past and current geoscience processes.
