Today at the Front Porch Library we did a little bit of thisa and a little bit of thata. We began with science and the history of human beings figuring things out. We talked about Edmond Halley who decided that the comet he was seeing in 1682 was the same comet that had been sighted in 1531 and 1607.
How did he figure that out?
We did the math and discovered it was the interval between the appearance of the comets.
They were the same (well, one year off–nothing is all that tidy). He then predicted its reappearance in 1768. Of course he didn’t get to see his hypothesis proven true, but it was.
We talked about hypotheses, and I posed questions like: if you found sea shells in the rocks at the top of a mountain, how might you explain it? Olivia went to higher sea level as an explanation immediately.
Then we got out the big rock and the little rock. Which will hit the floor first if dropped from the same height? We generated three (and we thought, all the possible hypotheses): big rock hits first (heck, it’s heavy), little rock hits first (no good explanation, but it was a possible choice), or third, they hit simultaneously, falling being in some way a uniform event.
C won! But the belief that had acceptance for years was Aristotle’s. He said, if the object is twice as heavy it falls twice as fast. He had the hypothesis, but he never tested it. Galileo did. He got the same result we did. Mr, John, our expert on everything, explained that gravity acts equally on all matter. The size is irrelevant. It was a good exploration of the scientific method.
About then, Joe, Killean, and Anora fell through the door. We were all happy to see them, “Hey, where have you guys been?”
Quick change: I opened my word jars (noun, adjective, verb). We took turns drawing one out of each jar, then each of us had to create a sentence using the words. It generated some really hilarious sentences.
Then Klark and Joe grabbed the basketball, Olivia, Briana, Anora and I moved on to art. First we created a random pattern by dripping ink on cardboard and blowing it into crazy, branchy patterns using bendy straws, then we drew into the pattern. Olivia made a beautiful thicket, then drew butterflies on the branches.
It was a great day at the FPL–and it ended with lemon cake.
The Front Porch Library 