Hurricane Emily

Someone seems to have amassed a great deal of energy recently. Emily can't sit still for five minutes at the moment, lol, so the title seems apt. [Added: forgot to mention that Emily went to SUFC training last night and came back filthy, muddy but very happy having made two new friends and met up with an existing friend from ballet. She was cross that it only lasts an hour, though. Sadly, it's only running on Monday nights for another couple of weeks, then they're only doing Saturday mornings during the winter, which Emily can't got to because it clashes with flippin ballet. Personally, I'd rather she did football than ballet, but hey, it's her choice. Perhaps they'll have something on during half term and the Xmas holidays that she can go to at least, before going back to Monday evenings in the spring when the lighter evenings arrive.]

Today we've been back to the weather project, focusing on hurricanes. This morning, Emily used books and CD encyclopedias to research how hurricanes form. She wrote a report about it, including information about where they form, hurricane season and diastrous hurricanes from the past. She was fascinated with the hurricane names system and we spent a long time researching past incidences of Hurricane Emily, including a particularly destructive one from 2005. For some reason, although storms which reach category 5 usually have their names retired, Emily wasn't retired and will be used again in 2011.

Emily also found out about the differences between hurricanes, cyclones and typhoons and plotted on a world map the oceans which fuel each type. We also read various newspapers reporting that the tail end of Hurricane Gordon is due to hit the UK at the end of this week, and I reminisced about the Great Storm of 1987 which did a lot of damage in Berkshire, where we were at the time. I remember going to school the next day and finding all kinds of damage there and trees uprooted on the edge of the fields and so on. I think there's still some debate about whether or not that was the tail end of Hurricane Floyd, but anyway, it was an interesting discussion.

This afternoon, we did some experiments to prove how warm air rises, and got very wet swirling water around to find out why the eye of a hurricane is calm and to establish where abouts in the spiral the forces might be strongest.

Then we hot footed it off to yoga. Emily's knowledge of sanskrit is coming on really well, but rather worryingly she still hasn't been given the sheets detailing what she needs to know for her level 4 test and she'll be tested the week after we come back from holiday, so they need to get a move on!