If you ever find yourself facing a landslide, you can hope for luck – or you can hope you’re with a Windsor 4th grader.
Those students from Bell, Weeks and Palmer elementary schools studied weathering and erosion in the Our Changing Earth unit is science class. They had to solve the mystery question, how could you survive a landslide?
Students learned about the causes and dangers of landslides. Students then conducted an investigation with top soil in a bin and a “house” made of two dominoes that experienced a lot of rain poured from a pitcher.
Students used engineering skills and designed solutions for preventing landslides, protecting property, and keeping people safe. They placed a rock somewhere in the bin to serve as an object to divert water away from their house.
“We had to put the rock somewhere in the beginning and put the dominoes somewhere. It was a two-part process but we did it well and had fun,” said 4th grader Jaden Rick.
Students experimented, observed, and recorded results of six different hillside house placements and design solutions. They analyzed their results so that their engineering teams could come up with the best solution to keep their hillside house from getting washed away. After observing the results, some developed some creative ideas.
“I would have a reinforced wall or building shaped as a triangle to steer the water away,” said 4th grader Wyatt Sienko.
Students will next take part in erosion, weathering and deposition stations to study how is the earth changing and can we predict what it will look like in the future.