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Making Waves


Last week we spent the week down at the shore house.  The kids are crazy about the water so we spent as much time as we could at the beach.  One day we were sitting in the sand just far enough in that when the waves came in we’d get soaked and pushed around a bit, but not so far that we’d have to test out the Coast Guard approved life vests that my kids seemed to be the only kids on the beach wearing.  Better to be safe than sorry!  Briana looked at me and said, “Mommy, what makes the waves keep on coming?”  I told her that I didn’t know and thought maybe it had something to do with the rotation of the Earth.  She thought that someone must be pushing them that’s so far away we can’t see them pushing the waves.  I promised that I would look it up and let her know.  So that night I did; however, in the morning the in-laws/ grandparents arrived and, as it should be, the kids would much rather have fun running their grandparents ragged than finding out what caused the waves. 

This week we’re back at home and I told Briana that I found out what caused the waves.  As it turns out, waves are caused by wind.  More specifically, the wind transfers its energy to the water when air molecules push on water molecules.  The wave’s size depends on the wind’s speed, duration, and distance from the water.  The interesting thing that I also found out was that waves never move horizontally as it seems.  They only move up and down.  Even I was skeptical so I kept cross referencing the information as if I was going to find a site that said the first 10 sites I looked at were created just to fool me.  The only exception that I found is tidal waves (tsunamis), which are caused by underwater earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, or landslides.   Finally I found a plausible explanation and told the kids my anthropomorphic toddler version –

When the wind flies over the water it tries to pull the surface (top) of the water with it.  The top of the water isn’t as fast as the air so it comes up to try to grab the air and ride with it.  Then gravity pulls the water back down.  The water in the bottom that gets smooshed when the top water falls down, pushes the top water back up and that creates the wave.  A way to look at the waves only moving in a vertical direction is to watch a buoy go up and down and not sideways.  

I told the kids that today we were going to try to prove that the waves only went up and down because of the air.  “Prove” may be a little bit inaccurate, but that’s ok.  Bree screams “Yeah, an experiment!” multiple times.  Well, technically, “ex-peer-ee-ent”.  Abby tried to copy with “peer-ree-ren”, but all told we were ready to run some wave experiments.

The first thing I did was to grab a jump rope and show the kids that you can move something sideways even if you only actually push up and down.  The kids each took one end of the jump rope and only moved it up and down and we watched the “wave” go sideways along the rope.


Then I got out an old pan and put a little bit of water in it.  We were going to first move the pan up and down to see the waves go sideways, and second blow and see if we could make waves.  The kids made waves all right…


  
Ok, that was a silly way to do that on my part.  Too bad it was raining out or we could have done this, as intended, on their water table in the backyard.  I learned from my mistake, cleaned up, and tried it over the sink.


That went much better.  Abby just splashed and then dumped her water again, but at least it went in the sink.  Bree tried making bigger and smaller waves by blowing faster and she watched the waves go sideways as she rocked the pan.

Then I asked the kids to go into the playroom and find something that could demonstrate how waves are made and show me.  First Bree got a jump rope.  I told her that we’d already done that and she needed to think of something different.  She told me “I picked a yellow jump rope.  That IS different than the pink one, but I’ll try again.”  In the meantime, Abby had selected her “lovey” (a feather boa).


She shook it, danced a little, and said, “I up down.  I makin’ wave!  Once upon a time.  And a wave.  The End.”  She is very into stories right now, though hers tend to be missing a bit of the middle right now.  Usually the middle is a long stream of gibberish so I’m happy that the story was on topic and containing real words this time.

Bree found a flashlight and told me that she could shake it up and down and it would make a long wave on the wall if we turned the lights off.  That’s pretty out of the box.  I kind-of was expecting long ropes or some of the toys (balls, pens, a baby chew toy that needs to be retired) that have water in the middle to move around.


Who says you can’t bring the beach home with you.

<3 Pedigreed Housewife

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