Japan, washed away in a moment of massive energy liberation due to the same. Take a pencil, bend from both ends. Watch… it will break. The earth is no different… but try to explain the shifting of chunks of ground, pressing against each other to the point where they start to bend and eventually break, releasing all that tension to a 4 year old and you get some interesting looks.
Tsunami? What’s that? Oh… an excuse to displace water by the very brilliantly placed whack of a little hand. Houses and buildings in the water’s path? Enter little green peanuts from the FedEx delivery yesterday. Foam for sand, shore, and higher ground… and voila! Water everywhere, including the shoreline, counter, surrounding islands, and even well into the forest 1000 ft higher than the sea, high enough to find coffee beans. And tea.
How does an earthquake happen? How about what it can cause… “It can just really make you dead”, eloquently spoken by my dear little one.
We don’t live near fault lines. “Well of course we don’t. It’s not our fault the earth needs to bust in the middle and shake once in a while… is it?”
We’re safe. “Yeah, we’re safe, unless we forget to watch the wave and move out of the way, then we’re either dead or end up with our face in the sand like I did, plopped flat into the ocean. You should have caught me mom! That was just awful.. that day… that wave. UGH! Made me soooooooooo mad.”
“Mom, what makes the ‘ch’ sound again?”
CH
“Ah, ok, so I think we need to write signs for the couch and chair.”
Ok
“Ck (because ‘ck’ sounds like ‘kuh’), then AW… CH. Ckawch, that spells COUCH!!”
How do you spell chair?
“That’s easy.. C H E R (sounding it out as she want). See I’ll just write it so it will be easier for ya!”
Sounding out everything, figuring out the spelling based on stringent phonetic rationalizing, and deciding to first write the letters, then coloring them in for whatever reason it has struck her fancy today. She now knows that the continent we live on (“That’s the northery on,e right mom?”) has shifted over time, and that the land on the earth has not always looked like it does today. She is still wrestling with the idea that maps, and real land, might be similar.
Bill Nye – Earthquakes made a lot of sense. We will make this http://pbskids.org/zoom/activities/sci/seismometer.html tomorrow.
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 Sent in by:
Alexander of Alexandria, VA
Make a machine to measure movement.
- cardboard box with the flaps cut off
- plastic cup
- felt tip marker
- string
- cup of small rocks, marbles, or bolts
- clay
- paper
- scissors
- Do you know what a seismometer is? It’s a machine that shows earthquakes or other movement. Here’s how you make a really simple one that can measure movements that you make in your house.
- Check with a grown-up before you begin. Cutting a cardboard box can be pretty tricky.
- First, take a box and open the top. Cut off the flaps and turn the box so the open side faces you.
- Using scissors, poke two holes next to each other in the center of the top of the box. You may want to ask an adult to help with the scissors.
- Poke one hole in the center of the bottom of the plastic cup, one hole along the rim of the cup, and another hole exactly opposite that hole.
- Put the marker through the hole in the center of the bottom of the cup. The writing end should be sticking out of the bottom of the cup.
- Put some clay around the hole so that the marker won’t move.
- Cut a 45cm piece of string (although if you have a bigger box, you may need a longer piece) and thread it through the two holes along the rim of the cup.
- Then, thread the string through the holes in the box, so that both ends of the string are equally in the box. Tie the ends on top of the box.
- Fill the cup 3/4 of the way with something that’ll weigh the cup down. You can put anything in the cup to weigh it down-marbles, bolts, rocks, anything heavy will work.
- Cut a strip of paper that’s as long as the box and approximately 5 inches wide.
- Put one end of the paper under the marker. Take the cap off the marker and make sure that it sticks out of the cup far enough so it touches the paper.
- Now have someone shake the box right and left while someone pulls the paper forward. If you do this right, you should get a squiggley line on the paper.
The more you shake the box, the wider the lines will be. Try pounding on the table and see what kind of lines it makes. Try making some changes to it so that it can detect really small movements, like singing or talking softly. You could also try making the holes in the box closer together or adding more weight to the cup.
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