Classroom activity Grade 6 Science
The Cindermoor Valley Aquifer: A Shared Groundwater Pumping Game
A grade 6 science game where small groups pump from one shared aquifer of counters, learning why groundwater is limited and recharges slowly.
Objectives
- Students will model how pumping and slow recharge change the water stored in a shared aquifer over time.
- Students will argue from their game data how rising water use affects a shared groundwater supply.
Vocabulary
- Aquifer
- An aquifer is an underground layer of rock, sand, or gravel that holds water in the tiny spaces between its grains. Wells reach down into aquifers to bring water up to the surface.
- Groundwater
- Groundwater is water that has soaked into the ground and fills the spaces between soil particles and cracks in rock underground. It is a large underground source of fresh water that wells and springs draw from.
- Recharge
- Recharge is water soaking down through the ground to refill an aquifer, the way rain refills an underground sponge. Aquifers stay healthy only if recharge keeps up with pumping.
- Drawdown
- Drawdown is how far the water level in a well drops when a pump pulls water out. The harder and longer you pump, the bigger the drawdown gets.
Teacher overview
This is a small-group simulation game for groups of four students, playable by the whole class at once. Each group shares one jar of counters that stands for the Cindermoor Valley aquifer, a fictional underground water supply. Every student plays a different water user who pumps counters from the jar each round, while the teacher adds only a few counters back to stand for slow recharge. Because the jar is refilled far more slowly than it is emptied, students see directly why groundwater is a limited resource that can be drawn down faster than it recovers.
Activity Directions
Before class, set up one jar per group with exactly 60 counters, and print four role cards per group: Town, Farm, Factory, and Household. Each card gives the role's name and what it uses water for: Town (homes, schools, and businesses), Farm (watering crops, with the greatest need in summer), Factory (cooling and cleaning machines), and Household (one family's drinking, cooking, and washing). Each role is one player.
Explain the rule that maps the game to real groundwater: the jar is the aquifer, a counter is a unit of stored water, pumping removes counters, and recharge (the teacher adding counters) puts a little back slowly, the way rain seeps underground over months.
Hand each group a recording sheet with columns for the round number, counters added by recharge, counters each role pumped, and counters left in the jar at the end of the round.
Start each round with recharge: the teacher tells every group to add 5 counters to its jar to stand for slow, steady recharge.
Each player then secretly writes on a slip how many counters to pump that round, choosing any whole number from 0 to 6, based on their role's needs.
Players reveal their slips at the same time and remove that many counters from the jar in turn. If the jar runs out before everyone has pumped, the remaining players get nothing that round, which counts as a shortage.
Groups record the counters left in the jar at the end of the round on the recording sheet.
Repeat the recharge-then-pump sequence for eight rounds, or stop early for any group whose jar hits zero, and mark the round when the shortage happened.
End the game and bring the class together at the recording sheets for the debrief questions below.
From Water for Schools (waterforschools.org). This material is in the public domain (CC0) and may be copied, edited, and shared freely.
Answer Key
Debrief question: "What happened to the water left in the jar over the eight rounds?" Answer: In most groups the jar dropped over time, because players pumped more counters each round than the 5 that recharge added back. Accept answers that describe a steady drop, or a group that stayed level only because players pumped about 5 total per round.
Debrief question: "Why did recharge of 5 per round not keep the jar full?" Answer: Because the four players together could pump far more than 5 counters in a round, so the aquifer lost water faster than it was refilled. This models how groundwater recharges slowly while pumping can remove water quickly.
Debrief question: "If a fifth user joined Cindermoor Valley, or if the town grew, what would happen to the shared aquifer?" Answer: More users or a larger town would pump more each round, drawing the aquifer down faster and causing a shortage sooner, unless users pumped less each. This is the argument that rising consumption strains a shared water supply.
Debrief question: "What could the players agree to do to keep the aquifer from running dry?" Answer: Accept reasonable ideas such as limiting how much each user pumps per round, taking turns, or pumping less in dry stretches, and connect these to real rules communities use to share groundwater.
Differentiation
Support
Give these groups a recording sheet with the recharge column already filled in with 5 for every round, so players focus only on tracking what they pump and what is left. Pair a student who needs support with a partner who helps count counters out of the jar.
Extension
Have a group play three extra rounds in a "dry spell" where recharge drops from 5 to 2 per round, then write a short comparison of how much faster the aquifer fell and what the players changed about their pumping.
ELL supports
Pre-teach aquifer, recharge, and drawdown with a simple cross-section drawing of water stored underground and an arrow for slow recharge. Provide the sentence frame "When users pump more than recharge, the aquifer ___," and allow debrief answers to be given orally or by pointing to the recording sheet.