Tsunami - Earth Science Unit Study

Week 30 - Tsunami
We built sand castles and then noted the percent destruction when damaging them with varying amounts of water.

Our favorite video series this year by far is How the Earth Was Made. Since there's an episode on tsunamis, we watched it.

We also read a few books about tsunamis.

Tsunami! - When the ocean pulls back, the villagers are curious and walk towards it to investigate. Ojisan is a village elder is not fooled. He's scared, but knows what to do when the Tsunami strikes.

Selvakumar Knew Better - This book tells the true story of how a dog helped save a young boy during the 2004 tsunami.

The Big Wave - This book was about so much more than a tsunami. It told the story of how people dealt with the tsunami years afterwards. I happened to read this book while dealing with my own post traumatic stress disorder due to my daughter's Leukemia and it actually really helped me to cope.

Water Volume verses Destruction

One local park has a nice water/sand play area, so our experiment was done there. First, a sand village was constructed.

 Next, one-fourth of a bucket was poured down the channel headed strait for the village.

 The water flowed out of the channel and destroyed the structures on the water side of the sea wall.

The village was rebuilt, and the entire process was repeated several times increasing the amount of water in the tsunami.

Each time the percent of damage was noted, and a graph showing water volume vs damage was created with the results.

There are still a few weeks left in our Earth Science study, so be sure to visit next week for more.