More Earth Science

It has been nearly 4 weeks since Mane's grandma, my mother, passed away. Last week we gently began turning our minds back toward school here at Peregrin House. The return to something solid and normal, like earth science, has been helpful. Our minds needed some direction and focus, and what better to focus on than good, solid earth...or maybe major catastrophes like earthquakes and volcanoes...depending on how you want to look at it...

Mane is working on a project mapping where earthquakes happen in the world every day, looking for a predictable pattern, and observing the relationship between earthquakes and volcanoes. (Find the Musical Plates project here: Musical Plates: A Study of Earthquakes and Plate Tectonics.) She started by writing her hypothesis regarding these things in her science notebook. Then she learned how to look up the USGS website where earthquakes are mapped as they happen and how to set parameters for which earthquakes she wanted to appear on the map (those that happened that day between the magnitudes of 4.0 and 10.0). She's practicing using latitude and longitude degrees to mark the earthquakes on the large map. Then she's checking her location against the listed location of the earthquake online!

 After learning about how earthquakes are measured, she and her friend built a seismograph together on Tuesday this week (instructions here):

 And then the lovely ladies went to the sunroom to make potions...