I Survived: The San Francisco Earthquake, 1906

I Survived: The San Francisco Earthquake, 1906 by Lauren Tarshis

For our third "I Survived" book club meeting we talked about the San Francisco Earthquake. This program was broken down into 3 parts: book discussion, snack and activity.

Discussion 

 If I'm being perfectly honest, this was not my favorite "I Survived" book and I'm afraid that might have played a part in our discussion. This book just didn't capture me like Thomas's heroism in I Survived: The Battle of Gettysburg or Ben's journey of survival in I Survived: The Japanese Tsunami. But this isn't a book review so I'll keep my opinions to myself 😉

After discussing our favorite parts and asking questions about the book, we covered a couple different talking points.  These included the science behind an earthquake and impacts of the San Francisco earthquake and what made this event so unique. 

This group actually found the resulting fire that broke out in the city very interesting - especially the part where several buildings were blown up with dynamite in attempts to stall the fires. I even read that people in towns 50 miles away said the fire gave off so much light, they could read a newspaper at midnight.

Snack

Themed snacks were a little harder to come up with for this book club meeting than the others had been, but we managed. /div>

Cookies (extras from a previous program), Sour Dough bread and Hershey's Chocolate Bars. 

During my (mostly fruitless) search for snacks specific to either the 1910's or San Francisco, I found a story about San Francisco becoming famous for Sour Dough bread  during the gold rush. Miner's would buy a loaf of bread in the morning and eat it throughout the day. In particular, there was one family that came from France and has used the same sour dough starter since 1849 and legend has it that during the 1906 Earthquake, one of the family members was able to save a bucket of the mother dough! Here's the article link for more info...

Then the Hershey's chocolate bars were just wrapped in card stock with news headlines printed on them. 

Marshmallow Structure Activity

For our activity, we attempted to recreate the effects of an earthquake on homes. We built structures using marshmallows and toothpicks and then tested the durability of our structures by shaking them.

This activity came from this Teachers Are Terrific link. We used the shake tray with the foam board suspended by elastic.

The group LOVED this activity but these structures took a while to build. They were given 10 minutes to build and then we would shake together. But when it would be 2 minutes til time to shake, someone's building would collapse and they'd need more time to build, so we'd give the group an extra 5 minutes and then another persons would fall and so on and so on.... 

Eventually we did shake our building and most of them actually survived our earthquake simulator! 

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All in all, it was a great book club meeting. Can't say I would have done anything different! Happy planning in your own Book Club endeavors!

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