Michael likes to think about how things work and why. What are they? Why do they behave as such?
Yesterday he lined up 4 marbles. He would roll one marble and hit the 3 stationary marbles, then watch the one at the end of the line go shooting off. Thrilled with his discovery he called for me to share it with him. We talked about the distance the last marble traveled, and how fast it moved. We talked about that it depended on how fast he rolled the first marble. I shared the concepts of mass, velocity and distance with him - of course the physics basics. It was fun, thoughtful and for the first time in my life I was interested by physics because it was with him (not my strongest class in college to say the least - even after a couple of years of it!!). "Does this happen with anything else he asked?" I answered that it does - like with cars! (Remember all those physics problems with cars crashing?!?). We talked about the speed of the cars, and how it would be different if a semi truck hit the line of cars versus a tiny car. He was interested in all of it. Just fun.
On Friday we were driving to the park after school and he asked me, "What exactly is light?" He wanted a real answer. I told him that some people thought it was electrons, and some people thought it was like a wave. We discussed the differences and I said we could read more about it together. ...just what he thinks about when he has a spare minute to let his mind go where it wants. Guess I need to brush up on my physics!!
No comments:
Post a Comment