Mika Lappalainen | Friday, 19 April 2019
I found myself playing with water and sand today. When I was child we often made dam and ditch. Then we open dam and we got heavy stream where to put some floating and watched who’s ”boat” made longest trip. Now when I’m grown-up (I’ll never be old) I found myself playing same game but from different approach. Snow is melting and there is some pond (this is difficult thing, same english word but in Finnish 5 different meaning if you use google translator). So I was playing today.
I was walking home from reindeer farm when I decided to make ditch to get rid of water (pond) from our crossroad. I did that and then I decided to fix ”stream” which was coming from yard. Our street is about 100 meter, so I made some improvements to get water out. While doing that I started to look how stream is working. When water was too clear to see burls and eddies, I kicked some sand to water and got muddy water again. Then it was easy to see how water works behing rocks. How water is looking when it is really shallow etc. I played this game almost 45 minutes and took some photos also about stream. You can see how small my ”river” is because there is some pine needles by the stream.
I found this play really useful but also fun. You can play it with children and spent time with them while you are studying. And if kids ruins your stream they just give you new approach and new river. While you are reading this we will be with children in Swedish Lappland over Easter. They wanted to join us when we are going ice fishing and having short break after winter season. Cover photo is from last winter when there was heavy storm in mountains but I want to go fishing anyway.
Happy Easter and have playtime with kids.
Mika from Finland
