the comet that killed the unicorns, pt 1

"I can't believe it, you slept through that storm?!"
"Ehh, I slept through the comet that killed the unicorns."

Guess what the sprogits favourite movie is at the moment? They're asking to watch it once a day at the moment. I'm still alright with it, it hasn't progressed to the point of it driving me stir crazy yet, although we are slowly learning the script off by heart.

Anyway, this morning, over breakfast, Small Clanger said "she says... 'ehh, I slept something something unicorns' doesn't she?" and Little Clanger filled in the bit that she knew which was 'that killed the', so I told them the whole sentence. Little asked if a comet really did kill the unicorns, so I explained that unicorns are, as far as we know, a mythical creature and, like dragons, only exist in our imaginations. But also, that Ice Age 4 is fiction anyway, so it doesn't matter whether or not unicorns really exist for the purpose of a fictional story.

So then they posed the question of "what's a comet?". So I got out our encyclopedia and we looked at the pages on meteors, asteroids and comets; I read to them that comets are made of frozen gases rather than rock like meteors, and how they have a tail of gases and ice. I was using my hands to indicate the head of the comet and then the tail trailing backwards but it gave the impression of comets only being the size of a football, which they obviously aren't. I said they were huge, at least as big as the whole estate we live on, but wasn't sure exactly so I decided to turn the computer on to get some more info. I put on Explorapedia (it's a computer-based encyclopedia for (in my opinion) younger kids... all the voices have America accents, and some of the info is out of date, but otherwise it's very good), found the "universe" bit, and we listened to lots of info about comets (as well as each of the planets, the moon, the sun etc etc). Little's eyes nearly popped out at the knowledge that a comet's coma can be up to 7.5 times the size of Earth, and their tails can be up to 100 million miles long. So, much bigger than our estate then....! lol.

Going back to the original question, we talked about how something hitting the Earth would create a crater, and how really big impacts would cause earthquakes, tsunamis and send clouds of dust up into the atmosphere, blocking out the sun. I asked what they thought that would mean. Little said nobody would be able to see, and I said what about the plants? She suddenly got a lightbulb look in her eyes and said that the plants needed light to live so they would die, and that if all the plants died we'd have less oxygen. Then we talked about how no plants = no food for herbivores = no food for carnivores so quite a lot of the animals would die as well. This lead to a brief discussion about the impact that caused the mass extinction of the dinosaurs, but that some of the smaller creatures survived, including mammals and smaller dinosaurs that eventually evolved into birds. We finished the conversation with, had there been unicorns living at some point, an impact of a comet or a meteorite would throw up dust, kill off all the grass, thus removing the food supply for unicorns meaning they would all die. Mission complete.... right?

No, of course not! We went outside to the sandpit:

It's been empty for a while since they pretended the sand was fairy dust and spread it all over the garden - great fun, until you run out of sand, plus then there's no sand in the sandpit either! Anyway, we emptied out the water that has accumulated after they left the lid off and filled it with 2 bags of sand which were given to me in the summer:

We flattened the sand out and the kids went and picked some stones from the gravel at the side of the house, and we spent a while throwing them as hard as we could into the sand to see what kind of craters they made. Here are our craters:

Deep and narrow craters from stones coming straight down.

Long, thin, shallow craters from stones coming down at an angle.

And, to keep on topic, here's a unicorn that almost got killed! ;)

Then we felt a bit cold, so we came back inside and had tea and biscuits:

Small spent a while playing on Explorapedia again, but after a bit he and Tiny Clanger went upstairs to play with the duplo and Little spent aaaages listening to info about lots of different things, plus answering little quiz questions about them. Meanwhile I went out to the garage to fetch something for the next idea I'd had, and we all gathered around the kitchen table to do the first part of it. You can't see it yet though, because it's not finished. Check back tomorrow or Friday for part 2 ;D