Tornado lesson

Right about the time I started planning our Kansas unit, I was searching the internet for what to do for our geography lessons and inadvertently stumbled into a cool science lesson. I saw this really cool idea over at Sewing School.  In her version, she supplied them with lots and lots of different building materials and they tried to stand up to the Big Bad Wolf.  But, that would be one of the differences between a public school (by the way wouldn’t you love her as your teacher?), and homeschooling.  That or I didn’t want to search for different building materials.  I knew Legos would stand up…….. Future Ticia 2024 says another time I would have given them more supplies to build with, but for this tornado lesson, I kept it simple.

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Tornado lesson supplies

Future Ticia 2024 here, I’m realizing I could turn this into a whole unit with the various posts I have written, makes notes to go back and do that.

We read many books, so check out our Kansas Unit, again I should make an entire tornado booklist, and wow I need to update that post…

• toothpicks
• mini-marshmallows, you want them to be a little stale so they have more form
• hair-dryer

Our Tornado lesson

So, after reading all of our fun tornado books I set them out with toothpicks and large numbers of mini marshmallows to design a tornado-proof house.

And they built

and built

and built.

Finally, I declared an end after 10 minutes.

And then the mean old tornado (or hair dryer, might as well get used for something) came in and tried to blow over their houses.

They stayed up.  They swayed a little bit, but they stayed up.  At first, I made a video of it, but a video of some toothpicks doing nothing isn’t very exciting.

And then came the best part of all, eating the evidence.

Brief interlude for more weather ideas

We’ve actually had a fair amount of lessons for many different ages that are weather-related, and I think I might even have more tornado lessons somewhere, but for now I’ll stick to weather.

• Layers of the Atmosphere lesson
• Snow experiments
• Clouds Unit
• How does ocean temperature affect a ship’s movement?

Except for Batman, who continued building, and then got his brother and sister in on the fun.

Only until they realized he was not intending to eat his house.  Instead, he got out toys and started to play with them and the bad guys were attacking and it was a major battle going on for the marshmallow house.

Can you see the epic battle going on there?

EPIC!!!!!!!!

That did require larger font, and now I can’t get the rest to go back to normal.  Okay, I really could, but it’s not a choice on the drop-down menu and I don’t want to type it in.  So, you’ll have to live with .5 bigger than the rest for this ending paragraph.

And, I think that ends what I have to report for our Kansas studies.  I’ll write a wrap-up post for later this week.

Justin1569 at English Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 3.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/, via Wikimedia Commons