Wednesday, January 20, 2010
Yesterday Jeff informed me that Joely, our 7 year old, had been asking him about what atoms were. He said he'd tried to explain it in terms she could understand, but that he didn't think she had really 'gotten it.'
And so I was assigned the task.
Well, I love science, so I eagerly took up the challenge. I got out my homemade white board and markers and Joely and I discussed the basics of atoms, elements, and molecules, using water as our basic example. As we got further into our discussion, I wanted to show Joely a good periodic table of elements, so I Googled it, and before long came up with this gem of a site — The Photographic Periodic Table of Elements.
On this unusual chart, each element is listed in the normal table format, but instead of just the symbol, there's a photographic example of each element.
On top of that, when you cursor over an element, more details about that entry are listed at the top of the table, along with an interesting nugget of information unique to that element, such as this one about palladium:
"Palladium is far more expensive than silver, yet it is sometimes used to imitate silver in outdoor situations because it does not tarnish. Side by side with silver, palladium is distinctly yellower and darker."
If you're doing a study about atoms or looking for a good periodic table, you might want to bookmark this site. It's definitely piqued Joely's interest about atoms and it's worth a look!
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Thursday, January 14, 2010
This morning my husband told me about a series of blog posts he's been reading about "lost knowledge," and it really made me start to think.
Have you ever wondered what would happen if some world-wide event suddenly rendered all technology useless? How would we fare as a nation? I'm not talking about the immediate aftermath of a situation like that, I'm talking the long term.
With technology grinding to a halt, so many of our industries would immediately cease to operate. The internet would be a thing of the past. Communication would slow dramatically. Food and clothing production and distribution would decrease drastically.
So what would we do for food? For clothing?
Do we have the skills that would help us through such a crisis? Or have we become so dependent on technology that we've lost some of the basic skills that would help us survive?
As homeschoolers we have the ability create much of our curriculum for our children, to tailor-make a course of study to meet our children's needs. Maybe we should consider adding in some more of the basic life skills that our great-grandparents grew up learning: how to grow a vegetable garden, hunt, start and maintain a fire, cook, can foods, knit, make soap and candles, sew clothing, and in general how to make things from scratch with their own two hands.
This isn't the typical course of study for most children in America, but maybe it should be. Basic skills like that might be more important in our children's future than knowing how to solve a quadratic equation. Just maybe.
I'm not saying we should neglect the "normal" topics children study today, but are we doing our children a disservice by leaving behind those "old-fashioned" skills of the past?
It's something to think about.
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