More Homeschool-style science

A comment on the post below about the 'tornado in a bottle' experiment reminded me of the fact that there are a lot of things in our life that haven't made it onto the blog because they happened earlier. One of those things would be Tate's obsession with tornadoes. Tate has always been my boy of passions. Bugs, trains, heavy equipment, tornadoes, pirates, Gatling guns, (no kidding), the Civil War... he throws his whole heart into his interests.













And his interest in tornadoes peaked in the kindergarten and first grade years. The boys were still in public school at that point. Tate managed to work his love of tornadoes into everything. I remember a "winter" project from Kindergarten (because, you know, they couldn't mention Christmas...). The teacher had given each child a pair of large construction paper "mittens" to decorate. All the rest of the class had snow-flakes, or snowmen, or holly, or Christmas trees on their mittens. Tate's had tornadoes.

We made a tornado with two 2-liter pop bottles. We bought weather books from the school Book Orders. We borrowed books and documentaries from the library. We scoured the internet for photos of tornadoes. Tate (with a little help) put together a 3-panel display for the Science Fair, complete with a quiz (and little lollipops for prizes - which made ours a very popular display.) He was probably the only first grader, at least in our area, who could explain the Fujita Scale, and who pestered his parents to plan their next vacation for Tornado Alley.

Anyway, one day I had a bright idea. I remembered watching the movie "Twister" several years before. I didn't remember their being any nudity or violence, and the special effects were incredible. I found a DVD for a few bucks and brought it home to the boys.
















What I didn't remember was that the movie was a stream of profanity from beginning to end.

Oops.

We eventually bought a TV Guardian, and until we got it hooked up the boys watched it...

in French.

Aw, there wasn't much of a plot anyway.