From Sea to shining Sea

The United States is a beautiful country with some very interesting landmarks.

We set out see to "see" some of these special places this week.

We took a flight from New York around the Statue of Liberty.

We left New York and landed in Pennsylvania. 

While there we visited a bell. 

Lochlan: The Liberty Bell.

Sadie: It has a crack.

We flew from Pennsylvania to Missouri to see the St. Louis Arch.

After visiting the 630 foot arch way,

 we flew to Arizona to experience the Grand Canyon.

We learned that for years and years the Colorado River has been flowing through it.  

We conducted an earth science experiment to look at how the forces of erosion affect the Grand Canyon.*

In our small box of sand, we made a river. 

We saw how it moved the sand which deepened and dried out as a canyon. When we gently blew on the sand like the wind we saw how the sand fell into the canyon.

We left the massive Grand Canyon for the second of our "shining seas".

We headed to the coastal range of northern California to admire the redwood forests.

These trees can get 70 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty! 

And she is tall!

We are home now. Back in the great state of Washington. 

Ready and prepared to celebrate our Shabbat Thanksgiving feast. 

The children have been singing a song of thanks.

They have prepared beautiful centerpieces for our tables, 

trees of thanks.

These trees are not tall like the redwoods. 

They are no less great. They were made by small, but great hands and from big, loving hearts.

*I will perform an experiment before I run it with the class to work out any problems or quirks.

This experiment looked easy and straight forward on paper.  

It failed twice.   

As a result, the kids were the happy recipients of the best kind of sand Wednesday - damp sand.  

So many good things happened that day, in particular the experiment was a success 

and the kids had wet sand to play with.