Shaker Table

Recently dd5 has been enjoying the educational video All About Earthquakes from Schlessinger Science Library. She loves all of their All About videos, especially when she can talk me into helping her do the experiments shown in the videos.

Today, we made a "shaker table" out of cardboard, rubber bands, and marbles (which we bought today especially for the experiment) to simulate the motion of the earth shaking during an earthquake. Then we made buildings out of toothpicks and gumdrops and tested their ability to stay standing on our shaker table. It was a fair amount of work, but even dd2 got into the building action...it didn't hurt that she was allowed to eat some of the gumdrops.