Today's School

This post might be more for the grandparents.  I haven't done a great job at keeping them informed about what we're learning in school and sharing cute pictures - sorry.  So...here's what we did this morning.

We've been learning about rivers this week.  Earlier this week we talked about and drew a map of OT Bible times rivers, lakes and seas - Nile, Tigris, Euphrates, Jordan, Red Sea, Dead Sea, Mediterranean Sea, Persian Gulf and the Sea of Galilee.  I don't know what they've learned, but I'm certainly more educated.

Yesterday at co-op's Discovery Days they had fun watching how waters flows from high spots to low and cuts a path as it goes.  They even created a flood where they had to create a dam to stop the water from flowing into the village.

Today, because I hadn't much planned but really thought I should be doing something fun and hands-on with them, went outside and turned on the hose.  First we filled up a bucket of water and took it over to a big mound of rocks/dirt we have in the side yard.  We climber to the top and dug a little hole for a mountain lake and then dumped some of the water in it.  Then we dumped the rest of the water into lake to see where the water would cut it's path down the mountain as the winter snow melted. 

Next we followed the instructions from our Compassion Explorer magazine to show what happens to water in a vegetated area versus a non-vegetated area.  We filled up two cookie sheets with dirt: one with just dirt and the other we added some rocks and clumps of grass.  We put a couple of bricks under one end of each pan and then dragged the hose over.  The kids had fun making it rain and watching what happened as the water made it's paths.


You can see that Sammy's vegetated mountain slope held where the rocks and grass was.  Livvy's non-vegetated slope all washed away - mudslide.  We had the perfect real-life example of this during the summer as the rains came and fell on our recently burnt mountain.  Slopes that used to hold the water gave way and several neighborhoods flooded including ours.  Thankfully this morning it was just a small localized flood that didn't result in any property damage - just some muddy pants.

Comments

Bree said…
can't wait til we do this too!!

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