Counting Waves

At Leo Carrillo Beach last week the girls and I spent well into half an hour measuring and counting the waves. We soon realized that we needed a way to keep track of our findings so we made marks on the sand (circles for big waves and lines for small waves...later we realized that we needed a symbol to represent "huge" waves.) Oleana pointed out that if really big waves came they could wash away our marks so they decided to add big and small rocks to the markings. We measured the waves using a small pool and a crack between the rocks. If the wave came through the crack in the rocks to fill up the pool the wave was designated "big" and if it did not then it was "small". The three of us alternated doing the jobs: calling out the size of the wave, marking the symbol in the sand with a stick and finding a rock to match the size of each wave. Oleana has been learning about patterns at school and we talked about trying to find the rhythmical pattern of the waves.

Here are our scientific findings:
[]OOOllOlOOOOOOlOlOOOOlllOlOlllOOlllllOlOlllOlOllllOllllllOOOllOlllOOOOOOlOlOOOlOOOlOlOllllllOOOOOOOOOOOOO[][]OOO

Oleana is very interested in the idea of symbols or "code" as she calls it. She has a new plan to transfer all of these findings into a new secret code of numbers. Small would be represented by 1 big would = 2 and huge would = 3...