First fill a basin with mud or clay
Give the children different size stones or mud balls and have them throw them into the basin. My kids were very timid with this so....
We let Daddy have a go. He made the best crater:)
Remove stones and examine your newly made craters and observed the changes in the mud/clay.
The next experiment we tried was from the book Solar System by Janice VanCleave's.
In this experiment we were trying to see how to measure the depths of a crater. I will have to try my best to describe this as only a few pictures were taken in our excitement of making craters:)
Fill a flat bottom bowl with cornmeal or sand. Place a flat side toothpick
into the sand and use a marker to measure how far the sand comes up the toothpick.
Next drop in marbles or stones into the sand at varying heights (we used a ruler) take the same toothpick as before and place into the middle of one crater and mark where the sand is. There should be difference in the marks and we discuss why.
Daddy having a go in trying to get a meteor to skip on the sand.
After wards we went to the internet and found this site that does computer simulated asteroid hits on earth and what the damage might be.
We had a great time with these experiments and it was nice to have Daddy home to help us:)
