Today's Science Lesson...

We are studying Japan right now, in preparation for Children's Day on May 5th.  The science suggestion in Galloping the Globe only had one little thing on the Japanese macaque, so I thought I would do something different.  (We watched a great show on netflix by the way that talked a lot about Japanese macaques by the way, so I think we got that covered.  It was the show Wildest Islands, season two episode one, Japan: Land of Extremes.  Really good, and, this shouldn't come as surprise to me, but Japan is so breathtaking!  I get in an American we have all the best scenery mode, and forget there are other beautiful lands.  I hope we get to move there!)

 So since Japan is pretty much it as far as tectonic forces go, I thought we would go over plate tectonics.  I have to be careful; the girls are already spooked since I may have exposed them to some documentaries about, oh, say, the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, before it was actually likely we would be moving there.  What can I say?  I've always liked learning about natural disasters.  So if I keep repeating my mantra of "no one is more prepared for disasters than the Japanese" hopefully we'll get through it.  And if we do get stationed in Japan in the future, I hope I won't have terrified children.

We started with this book:

Miss M read it to Miss R and I.  It's cute, a good way to start thinking about the subject.

Then we went through a few illustrations from the book Inside the Earth from World Almanac Library.  It's a basic earth science book from the library.  We talked about the layers of the earth, the plates and how they moved, and looked at a map of plates.  We reviewed India, she found it on the map, and looked at how the Himalayas are being pushed up.  Then we read this book:


I asked her first what tsunamis have to do with plate tectonics, and she didn't know.  So we read this, which is a really good story by the way, then I did a demonstration of how a tsunami starts.  I held a book horizontally above my lap to demonstrate the surface of the sea.  She held another one parallel to it to demonstrate the sea floor.  I bumped her book up to simulate an earthquake, and we talked about how the water would of course push up my book, or the surface of the ocean.