Did You Know? Natural Resources

Subject: Geography | Year: 6

Name: _________________________ Class/Set: ____________ Date: ____________

• The Sand Crisis: Believe it or not, sand is the second most-used natural resource on Earth, second only to water. We use it to create glass, concrete, and even the silicon chips in your computer, but we are actually running out of the specific 'angular' sand needed for building because desert sand is too smooth to stick together.

• Frozen Assets: While water covers over 70% of our planet, only about 3% of it is freshwater that we can actually drink or use for crops. Most of that is currently locked away in glaciers and ice caps, meaning humans and animals rely on less than 1% of the world's total water supply to survive.

• The Carbon Vault: Peatlands (wetlands like bogs and fens) are incredible natural resources that cover only 3% of the Earth’s land but store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined. Protecting these muddy landscapes is one of our most important tools for managing the Earth's atmosphere and climate.

• The Ancient Fuel: Oil is a non-renewable fossil fuel formed from the remains of tiny sea creatures called plankton that died millions of years ago. Incredibly, it takes approximately 24 tonnes of prehistoric organic matter—equivalent to the weight of four African elephants—to create just one litre of petrol for a car.

• Urban Mining: There is more gold found in a tonne of old, discarded mobile phones than there is in a tonne of gold ore dug directly from a mine. This makes 'urban mining' (recycling old electronics) a much more efficient way to gather precious natural resources than traditional digging.

---

⚠ TEACHER’S GUIDANCE

Pedagogical Pulse: 💡

• Contextualise: Use these facts to transition students from the concrete understanding of 'things we use' to the abstract concept of Sustainability and Finite Resources.
• Discuss: For the 'Sand Crisis' fact, ask students to identify five items in the classroom that wouldn't exist without sand (windows, screens, lightbulbs, etc.) to model the 'hidden' nature of resources.
• Oracy Focus: Challenge students to 'examine' the contrast between renewable and non-renewable resources using the 'Ancient Fuel' fact as a hook for the massive timescales involved in fossil fuel formation.
• Misconception Check: Ensure students understand that 'Natural' does not always mean 'Unlimited'. Many students assume that because resources come from the Earth, they will naturally replenish, which is a key barrier to understanding Year 6 Geography objectives.