Building towers

While I was getting some work done this afternoon the kids built a marble run behind me. Phoebe explained that this was a good thing because they built a marble catcher so that way the marbles wouldn't end up all over my room...but as you can see...there are marbles all over my room.

Benjamin prepared a lesson for Family Night this evening. He's going to be giving his first talk as a youth in a few weeks, so we wanted him to be thinking about what he might say and figured preparing a Family Night lesson would be the perfect way to ruminate about his topic. 

His assigned topic is from D&C 25: "I have an important role to play in God’s kingdom." This talks about Emma Hale Smith's work collecting hymns for a hymnbook, among other things. I also pointed Benjamin to 1 Corinthians 12, which talks about being members of the body of Christ...and then I went to class and left him to come up with something on his own. 

He successfully wrote a 1-page talk, which he read out loud as part of his lesson. 

In it he mentioned something about how just as removing the bottom block from a tower will make it fall over...everyone is needed to help the church/family unit function well. 

When he finished, Alexander's hand shot up.

"Yes," Benjamin said.

"I would just like to offer to construct some criticism."

"Okay..."

"Science tells us...that the tower would be fine."

"What?"

"If you quickly remove one block from the tower, like you said, science tells us that the rest of the tower will be fine. It's like inertia or something."

"Sure," Benjamin said, ignoring the advice of his little brother. "That's the next part of the lesson, anyway. Everyone needs to go downstairs and sit behind a space book. I've already put a foundation of blocks on each book. You need to build the sturdiest tower you can on the given foundation and then I'll remove the foundation and we'll see how well your towers stand."

"Oh, they'll stand just fine, because...science!" Alexander sang.

"Downstairs," Benjamin ordered.

So we all went downstairs to try Benjamin's experiment. With such a small base for our towers, we had no option but to build straight up.

X
X
X
X
X

Benjamin was aghast when all of the towers remained upright after having their foundations ripped out from under them. Alexander was not.

"YES! YES! YES!" he bellowed triumphantly. "SCIENCE!!!!!" 

Benjamin was a little muffed about his failed object lesson, so I suggested that he follow the constructive criticism his brother offered and modify the tower activity a bit. Rather than work individually on our towers (which isn't quite what the message of 1 Corinthians 12 is driving at, anyway), I suggested that we work together to build something. 

Also, we'd build it in a pyramid form, with each block on top resting on two of the blocks below, like so:

    X
   XX
  XXX
 XXXX
XXXXX

We dug out all of the square blocks in our bin of blocks and built a rather large pyramid together. These blocks were much more interdependent on the surrounding blocks, and when a block was removed from the foundation...the entire structure collapsed (just as Benjamin had hoped would happen).

We talked about Yertle the Turtle and some other things that will hopefully give Benjamin more to think about while he's revising his talk. One of Emily Dickinson's poems came to mind for me as well:

They might not need me—yet they might—
I’ll let my Heart be just in sight—
A smile so small as mine might be
Precisely their necessity—

Hopefully we all learned a little something about working together, about how we're all needed to do the work we can do, and...perhaps we also gained a greater appreciation for science as well.