Building a Dam!

Today the Summer Learning Journey challenged us (SLJ participators) to create a dam, out of natural resources. I made my mine in a aluminium foil baking tray, because their isn't a lot of running water at the moment. While making our dams, we were asked to take pictures of the steps, progress and final result (if we could). Here is how I made my dam... 

First off all, I started by folding up the edges of the tray to make more of a container. Like this..

In the photo above you can see the tray before I folded the edges.

And in this photo above you can see the tray after I had folded up the edges.

From there, I placed a layer of dirt in a straight line right across the centre of my tray. Then I added sticks and bark to support the centre of the dam wall. Like this,

After that, I used another layer of dirt to cover up the sticks, followed by a layer of ferns. I used the ferns as I thought that they could mesh it together with their shape.

And once again, covered the ferns up with dirt. Here is what my dam looked like, before I added water.

Afterwards, as my final step, I added water to one side of the container, to test if the dam wall in the middle blocked the water from seeking though to the other side. 

After pouring the water into one side, I left my dam sit there for around ten minutes. As I watched I saw that water was starting to flow into the other side of the dam. I think in conclusion it worked quite well, and it kept a lot of water from flowing to the other side. 

Although, next time if I made my dam again, I would make my dam wall a curved shape, and not just a straight wall, this is because the curve usually used in huge dams around the world like this one...

makes the structure stronger, and harder for the water to burst the dam wall. Next time, I would also use thick mud or clay, because when I placed the dirt, the surface of my tray was flat, so there were little gaps between the dirt and the tray. 

Have you ever built a dam at the river, creek, or at home?