Friday Science & Nature

On Friday, we set out early for science, hoping to have a little time to explore before class. We wandered until we located the beach, and found lots of interesting things to look at: dead horseshoe crabs, a big claw from some other sort of crab, seashells, and a cool feather.

Science class was about floods, landslides and avalanches. The kids used a ramp, rocks and test tubes (stand-ins for trees) to simulate an avalanche, and tested changing conditions such as the steepness of the ramp, the amount of material sliding, etc. Then they took a hike to the museum's flood pit (a sandbox with a hose attached to a trash can, which dumps in a flood), where they built a sandcastle and flooded it, then built a castle and tried to come up with ways to protect it from flooding (they tried moats, sand walls, etc.)