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Science Sunday: Kansas tornadoes

February 6, 2011 Ticia 13 Comments

Right about the time I started planning our Kansas unit I saw this really cool idea over at Sewing School.  In her version she supplied them with lots and lots of different building materials.  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……..

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.

 

020021022

And they built

and built

and built.

Finally I declared an end after 10 minutes.

027

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.

029030

028And then came the best part of all, eating the evidence.

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.

032

 

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.

 

I can’t wait to see everyone’s science posts.  I love going to see all of them (eventually, it sometimes takes me a week or two to read all of them).

STEM Kansas, Science Sunday

Comments

  1. April says

    February 6, 2011 at 2:30 pm

    oooh, fun building materials! marshmallows!

    Reply
  2. Discovering Montessori says

    February 6, 2011 at 3:46 pm

    I love this! I can also see the tornadoe as the big bad wolf. Very creative way to demonstrate tornadoes. Thank you for sharing.

    Reply
  3. An Almost Unschooling Mom says

    February 6, 2011 at 3:46 pm

    Glad to know I'm not the only one that has a hair dryer mainly as a school supply 🙂

    Reply
  4. Raising a Happy Child says

    February 6, 2011 at 4:01 pm

    What an awesome idea. Leah's comment cracked me up. Hair dryers will make excellent tornadoes.

    Reply
  5. Candace April says

    February 6, 2011 at 4:42 pm

    I've been seeing the marshmallows on some of my favorite blogs–we have a bag of mini marshmallows and I just need the toothpicks!

    My activity is a little bit of a stretch for the theme…it is a geometry exercise, though, so I hope it fits!

    Reply
  6. Nicole {tired, need sleep} says

    February 6, 2011 at 5:13 pm

    So much fun! We've done marshmallow and toothpick building before, but I love the added “tornado” to see how sturdy they were. We didn't need a hair dryer though – they fell over before Matthew was done building them. 🙂 We'll have to do this again some time!

    Reply
  7. karina says

    February 6, 2011 at 10:41 pm

    cool! I love sciencey stuff!!

    Reply
  8. karina says

    February 6, 2011 at 10:41 pm

    cool! I love sciencey stuff!!

    Reply
  9. Christy says

    February 6, 2011 at 11:30 pm

    Very cool! I didn't even think of using a hair dryer as a tornado. When we studied Kansas, we made the tornado in a bottle.

    Reply
  10. The Adventurer says

    February 6, 2011 at 11:45 pm

    JUst added your button to my blog and joined in the fun. We are doing alot of space experiments at the moment.

    Reply
  11. Kylie says

    February 7, 2011 at 7:51 am

    Love it and building with marshmallows is always fun.

    Blogger does that to me also. I generally type up the post and then go back and highlight the words I want to change so it doesn't affect the rest of my post. 🙂

    Reply
  12. Brandie says

    February 7, 2011 at 7:16 pm

    Such a cool idea! We do a lot of science over at our house, and now that I know you host a “meme” or “carnival” or whatever word you choose for yours, we will have to join in!

    LOVE the marshmellows as building blocks!

    Reply
  13. MaryAnne says

    February 9, 2011 at 6:43 pm

    This is a fantastic idea!

    Reply

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Ticia Adventures in Mommydom Hi, I'm Ticia! This is the adventures of my family in life and learning. Follow along with us as we share our adventures. We're having a lot of fun and learning as we go.

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