I Survived: The Japanese Tsunami, 2011
I Survived: The Japanese Tsunami, 2011 by Lauren Tarshis
For our second "I Survived" book club meeting we talked about the Japanese Tsunamis. This program was broken up into 3 parts: Book Discussion, Snack and Activity.
Discussion
Everything about this book was interesting and there was SO MUCH to talk about! Everyone in the group had read the book, so we started talking about our favorite parts of the book right away.
We actually covered alot of talking points in our discussion. This included talking about how a tsunami happens, Japanese history of tsunami's, tsunami's in America and the factors that made this event so unique (earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima).
One thing the kids found particularly neat was the "Sai-Shou-Maru", a fishermans boat that was cast out to sea and traveled over 4000 miles to Long Beach, Washington! Here's the link to one of the articles. The library has a great globe that we looked at to find Japan and Washington state to better visualize the distance the boat traveled.
Snack Time :)
It only seemed fitting to have Japanese snacks! Fortune Cookies, Pocky sticks (which are just like chocolate covered biscuit sticks), seaweed, green tea and coconut water.
I even brought my Hello Kitty coffee pot in to make the hot water for our green tea 😄
Another option for snacks was candy sushi, which is made with fruit roll up and other gummy candies. If we hadn't of planned a messy and more time-intensive activity we might have done that, instead.
Tsunami + Lego Re-enactment
For our activity we attempted to recreate a tsunami based on this Youtube Tutorial. I purchased 3 large rectangle bins from Target to use since we had none on hand. 
One bin I even bought for myself to use at the library and then take home - these bins are nice for putting fabric in! 
Set Up: The video does a very good job of going through how to set up this plastic bin for your tsunami. We did have a couple minor changes to ours. These changes were things such as, instead of using blocks of wood and gluing the plywood to the blocks to make our platform for the beach, we just set our platform on top on small plastic boxes filled with rocks - our blocks off wood kept floating up.
One thing I wasn't too fond of concerning ours was that our bins seemed to be just a little too short to get a good wave in.
For the activity itself, kids were split up into groups of 3 or 4 and given 10-15 minutes to build a Lego City to destroy. Once all the cities had been built we added water and made tsunami's using the plywood and string to create the wave.
Unfortunately, the Lego's we used must have been too strong because none of our cities were too badly damaged by the storm. 😝 Finding an alternative to use other than Lego's might be something to consider if you're wanting your city to fall. But how was I to know it wouldn't work?!
Overall, fun book, interesting discussion, Lego activity and unique snacks. Two thumbs up! 👍👍
Forgot to Mention....
To help visualize how tall the waves were compared to us, we had this little activity. The writing on the board say, "On some parts of the Japanese coast, the waves reached 100 feet high! That's nearly 25 time taller than you."
The question posed to the group was, how tall would the wave have been compared to the Lego Mini figure .... see him down at the bottom?
We took turns making marks on the board where we thought the top of the wave would be. Several of the kids thought that the wave would have actually been taller than what the dry erase board was, so they got stickers to stick on the wall. The star is how tall the wave would have actually been compared to the Lego Man.
💚💛💜
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