Yesterday’s post was about the failure of the Scott Expedition, which came about through a combination of bad judgement and bad luck. Failure isn’t always caused by those factors, though. Sometimes it’s just due to an unwillingness to persevere and/or adapt. Take the Vikings who went to Greenland. Their homeland had a harsh climate, but Greenland’s was harsher, and after about four centuries, they gave up on it. They made reference to seeing native-built snow houses but considered them, and other ways the native Greenlanders had of surviving the elements, inferior to their own. If they’d embraced such ideas, they might have established successful colonies.
Most kids like to build, and re-creating an historic structure like an igloo encourages an interest in bygone eras. Modern scientists working in Antarctica don’t live in igloos (neither did the natives of Greenland – they just used them for fishing & hunting trips), but they are taught how to build these still-useful protective shelters, and kids can too. Instructions for making real ones can be found at: http://www.hometrainingtools.com/physics-build-an-igloo-with-kids/a/1748/
but kids without access to sufficient snow can make indoor igloos using – 4 litre milk jugs! The one pictured above was built by kids attending an out-of-school-care programme. As you can see, they used an awful lot of milk jugs, so if you want to try it – start collecting!
