Do your kids play Roblox? It is an online multiplayer – player created – lego-ish game that also has forums.  Last night someone was posting a contest in the forum,  – go to a dictionary and give the most random word that you quickly find. The winner will get $500 Robox (Online Roblox Currency).  Nate got to the dictionary and came up with Norwhal,which is a whale in the artic that has a sword on the tip of its nose.

Which started the discussion of what sort of contest he could run on Roblox?  I said – well – Tomorrow is the day we are going to study Sound. Can you describe a sound? (enter Jr. High Jokes Here) Related to Geography Terms? (Crickets).  Ask your fellow Robloxians!

Nathan Posted the following on the Roblox Forums –

“The first one to say the definition of the geography term-sounds gets 50R$.  Well ,I’ll run this till 6:00.”

Eight people answered – and pursued a bit of banter  on whether a wiki answer should be valid or not – here are their answers.

• In geography a sound or seaway is a large sea or ocean inlet larger than a bay, deeper than a bight, wider than a fjord, or it may identify a narrow sea or ocean channel between two bodies of land (see also strait).
• *Says the definition of the geography term-sounds gets 50R$*
• A sound is a wide inlet of the sea or ocean that is parallel to the coastline; it often separates a coastline from a nearby island.

He gave the 50$ to the first answer-er  – but it still did not really help us know what a Sound looked like – we had to investigate what a Bay, Inlet, Bight, Fjord an Channel looked like.

Today we started with 2 rounds of 10 Days in Europe.   This is a great game that helps you learn the European Countries – but it also helps to learn the water ways.  You can travel through the bridges, seas and oceans. We looked at the water inlets to guess what each would be called. 

After the second game, we used the Dictionary and Ultimate Geography and Timeline Guide to look up the definitions, and drew what we thought they looked like.

So – to find out that a Sound is a pathway of water that is an inlet, larger than a bay, deeper than a bight, wider than a fjord, identified with a channel – we found that:

• a Bay is a part of the sea that stretches into the land, like Sunset Bay in Charleston Oregon;
• an Inlet  (land lets the water in) is the connection or entrance between the bay, sound, lagoon or marsh to the sea;
• the Channel or Straight goes between to pieces of land like the English Channel that runs between England and France;
• A Fjord is a long narrow inlet that has steep sides or cliffs that was created in valleys by glaciers like in Norway or Greenland;
• and that a Bight, besides being the bend in a string or rope, is also the bend or curve between and or water, in a large receding bay, and it is shallow  like the bight between the Netherlands, Germany and Denmark – which explains –

How we could now point to several areas of our European map, and know that they could be considered Sounds – Like the Puget Sound in Seattle – An Inlet of the Pacific Ocean, Larger than a bay, Deeper than a shallow Bight, Wider than a Fjord, even though it might have tall sides, and that – it might be identified as a channel or a straight – like the body of water between Denmark and Sweeden which connects the Atlantic and Baltic Sea.

Whew. (Big Breath).

Did you study a country that might have an Inlet, Bay, Straight, Fjord, Bight or Sound around its edges this month???? The 10 Days In series is a great tool to see the edges of the countries while drinking hot cocoa. 🙂

(my boys are used to using their Nature Journals to take scientific notes of nature
– so Jon instinctively wrote his daily observations, then made us do the same. 🙂 (Thanks Barb!)

Tour along with us as we learn a new Geography Term each month! Feel free to leave a link to your geography study notes here in the comments, even if you did not include Sounds this month. 🙂