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.
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.
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.
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).
oooh, fun building materials! marshmallows!
I love this! I can also see the tornadoe as the big bad wolf. Very creative way to demonstrate tornadoes. Thank you for sharing.
Glad to know I'm not the only one that has a hair dryer mainly as a school supply 🙂
What an awesome idea. Leah's comment cracked me up. Hair dryers will make excellent tornadoes.
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!
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!
cool! I love sciencey stuff!!
cool! I love sciencey stuff!!
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.
JUst added your button to my blog and joined in the fun. We are doing alot of space experiments at the moment.
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. 🙂
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!
This is a fantastic idea!