The Mountain (Resource consumption)

DO: Put a pile of something, e.g. books in the middle of the circle and explain that the children should imagine it’s huge!  It’s a mountain.

DO: Will need to use actors from around the circle for next bit, potentially all children in the group, so helps to go around the circle and take children one by one…

SAY: There was once a girl called Alice.  When she was young, she used to love playing on the mountain.  She would run up and down it and look for caves.  When she was a teenager she used to sit up there in the caves and make fires.  Then one day, she realised that when she took a rock onto the fire to heat up some soup, a glittery liquid started pouring out of the rock.  And then she realised the rocks were hiding gold!  ‘I’ll be rich!’ she thought.  And she took several more rocks from the top of the mountain (gesture child to take 2 or 3 books from pile) and melted these down to extract the gold.  And soon she was rich.

DO: Bring two more children into circle

SAY:  Alice eventually had two children, Bill and Betty who she used to take with her to the mountain to show them how beautiful it was and how the rocks were made of gold.  One day Alice died (goes back to chair) and Bill and Betty started to take the rocks from the mountain melting them into gold.  They too had children who they brought to play on the mountain: Charlie, Cheryl, Clive and Caroline and when eventually Bill and Betty died, Charlie, Cheryl, Clive and Caroline were left to take more rocks from the mountain to melt into gold, until eventually all the rocks were gone.  When their children, David, Diana, etc (list a whole load of D names, depending on class size) were born, they brought them to the space, but there was no longer a mountain.  So David and Diana never saw the mountain, in fact they didn’t even know what a mountain was… but at least, their parents all seemed to be so rich.

Task Question:

• Who destroyed the mountain?

Nested Questions:

• Who is responsible for destroying the mountain? (can also use as TQ, depending on age/ ability of children)
• Did the last ones or the first one destroy it?
• Was it wrong to take the rocks?
• Were the people greedy?

SAY: David, Diana, etc grew up very happy, and they loved travelling.  They spend all of their money on travelling the world, and then one day they came across something very new… because all they had ever known was flat landscapes and suddenly they found a huge lump in the ground – made of rocks. ‘It must be a mountain, like in grandma’s stories!” They thought.  Now David and Diana had travelled all over the world, and they had never seen anything like this before.  This could well be the last mountain on Earth.  They wondered how they should approach it.

Provocative Question:

• What should they do?

Task Question:

• should they destroy the mountain?

Nested Questions:

• Should they save it for future generations?
• Will they become greedy if they look for gold in the mountain?

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