Tornadoes!

E sat down at the playdoh and started smashing it onto the table top. She rolled it out with the rolling pin and ran her hand across the smooth surface. E picked up a pair of scissors and started scraping the top of the dough. 

"The playdoh is the same color as a tornado. That's what I am making. It swirls around and around like this."

E made a swirling pattern into the playdoh and described how it twisted and turned just like a tornado that was playing over the projector. 

"How does a tornado stop? Do you know what they sound like?"

She thought for a minute and tried to answer her own question. 

"I don't know what it sounds like, but it is really loud. Like you can hear it."

E scraped up her playdoh and started squishing it between her hands. She carefully rolled it between her palms to make two long tubes of playdoh. 

"I need to roll it to make it go around!"

E quickly smashed the creation. 

"I made the tornado stop! Now I am going to make it again."

This time E flattened her dough out again and began poking small holes. 

"Look, it's a huge tornado! It's growing with all of these things."

E stared at the large tornado she made. 

"It needs something."

She looked around the table and then picked up some purple playdoh. She began rolling out the dough and smashing it into a familiar rectangle shape. E then began to make small balls and pressed them onto the sides of the rectangle.

"It's a tornado car! It stays in the parking lot when a little tornado comes."

E drove the car around the table calling for tornadoes. She made it go across one side of the table to the other looking for tornadoes. 

E continued to work on her tornado and even involved V in her play. They worked in silence next to each other and adding to one another's playdoh creations.

E seemed to be interested in the construction of the tornado and how she could make it look like the what she saw on screen. She concentrated on imitating exactly what she saw through the projected video. Her self talk dictated exactly what she wanted to do.