The Learning Curve

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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I Survived: The Battle of Gettysburg by Lauren Tarshis

If you've never heard of the I Survived series by Lauren Tarshis and you work with elementary ages then I can only assume you've been living under a rock for the past year or so. These books are nearly on par with Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Geronimo Stilton in our library - we can barely keep them on the shelf! Very popular.

This realistic fiction series takes historical events such as wars and natural disasters and puts a child right in the midst of it. It's almost similar to the American Girl series in that respect however, one thing I like about this series is they are more gender neutral - making them a perfect series to base a book club around. This was my thought process when I choose this series for our 2018 school aged book club.

I Survived: The Battle of Gettysburg was the first on our list.

For this book club meeting , we broke it up into up into 3 parts: Discussion, Craft and Snacks.

Discussion

While trying to prepare for this program, I watched Youtube videos, documentaries and read several books trying to figure out what we could spend an afternoon talking about. Of course we would talk about the book, but I also wanted to talk about the war and what the daily life of a Civil War soldier would have been like. But yall, I became SO overwhelmed! There was just too much information and I hit a mental wall.

Thankfully my dad, an Army National Guard veteran was able to come out and talk about the Civil War!

As a collector (and with approval!), he was able to bring several neat things to show the kids including: an 1862 musket with a bayonet, an 1856 coin, and 1863 coin - which was VERY cool since that was when our book was set - and some bullets that were dug up at Shiloh.

My coworker, whose husband was a very enthusiastic reenactor several years back even let us borrow a coat that he would wear during reenactments. This was an authentic replica of an infantry soldiers coat.

The program lasted about an hour. We started out discussing our favorite parts of the book, talked about the Civil War (THANKS DAD!), made candles for our craft and had a snack.

Candle-Making Craft

Supplies: 1 lb Beeswax

Candle Wicks

Pencils

Candy Melter

Containers of water

This craft is repetition at it's finest!

We wrapped the candle wicks around the pencil securely and took turns dipping them into the hot wax. Once a wick had been dipped into the wax, it had to be dipped into the water. Our aim was to dip each wick 25 times (we might have lost count several times).

Eventually a candle forms. Surprisingly this wasn't as messy a craft as I had thought it would be. Instead, the bulk of the mess was just getting the dried wax off the candy melter and other containers.

Snacks for this program were cornbread and molasses cookies.

Overall, this program was a lot of fun! Although, I don't think it would have been the same without having our special guest speaker 😀 Next month is I Survived: The Japanese Tsunami... hope it lives up to this one!!

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