The eye of the storm...

 

On Mothers Day this year, Evie and I went up to Carillon Park in Dayton with my parents. There is a building there which depicts the 1913 Great Flood of Dayton and I'm not sure if it was seeing the images life sized or sitting in a boat from the floods or what did it but it really didn't sit well with Evie. Since then she has been consistently asking me if we are going to have a flood or a hurricane at our house. Even though I've explained to her many times that we don't live close enough to water for a flood (or a hurricane!) she just didn't seem comforted. Then her great grandfathers house flooded (not badly) and that just made matters worse! So today I decided to do a hands on activity for her to show her what causes a flood and why we aren't in danger of one.



First we made a little land mass in a bin filled with water and then we used princesses to act as the houses. I let her fill it up a little and then I showed her how the sun typically lowers the level back down before it can flood. Then I explained how if a TON of rain happens before the sun can dry it back up it will overflow into the land. We poured in lots of water and the princesses floated off into the water. After that I stacked up a few little "land masses" to make a really tall one and we tried the experiment again so that she could see that even with a lot of water people who live at high elevations (like my parents who live next to a river but up on a hill) aren't in much danger of a flood. She really had fun with this experiment and seemed to feel better about floods but THEN she said "but mama, what about a hurricane?"



So we added some mica (to help her see how the waves work) and some soap and made our own little hurricane too! We talked about how hurricanes form, how they move, that they often don't reach land and that even when they do they aren't always a huge deal. We also talked about how we live in a time now where people can forsee these types of weather and that allows us to get out of the way of them more often than people could in 1913.


It wasn't exactly what I had planned for today and we didn't have any elaborate set up for it but she loved it and she really learned a lot about weather! :)

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