Science, July and August 2020

Over the summer she practiced reading nonfiction for 5-year-olds. I practiced writing it. I browsed wikipedia and fed her little bits of it like she was a baby bird. A reading might tire her out but she could read it and understand it. If two weeks later I showed it to her again she could read it faster and understand it faster.

She was building a skill and a habit, but I don't know if the facts stuck with her. Today she can read well but I doubt she remembers anything about Aragon or Castile. I have kept on including details like that anyway.

Whether or not it was sticking, in the second week of June I found a way to double her enthusiasm for a reading lesson: I could put her name in the last paragraph. She would spot it when she was sizing up the page before we started. "Why does it say 'Maria' here?" and I would tell her to read it and find out. Once it was about dinosaurs and the last paragraph told a story about our outing at a museum. It was a true account that she remembered, but written in the third person.

I only pandered like that some of the time. Here is a less personal passage that I wrote for her after two sessions about dinosaurs-and-Maria:

Paleozoic Mesozoic six sixty million change changed living growing ocean forest swamp reptile frog

Life began in the ocean

All of the dinosaurs died out sixty million years ago. That was a time before people.

There was also a time before dinosaurs! The time of the dinosaurs is called "Mesozoic time." The time before dinosaurs is called "Paleozoic time."

During Paleozoic time, there were no dinosaurs. At the start of Paleozoic time, there were no living things on land at all! All of the plants and animals lived in the ocean.

Plants and animals changed a lot during the Paleozoic. At the start of it, everything lived in the ocean and nothing lived on the land. At the end of it, the land had lots of forests and swamps with tall ferns growing in them, and lots of bugs and frogs and reptiles living in them.

But dinosaurs came after.

I changed the subject to light, with the idea that I was going tell her about Newton working with prisms during the plague. I dropped it before getting to Newton, we spent September-October-November-December doing something else.

Earth planet universe sky why light right night eight whole bounce bounces minute minutes

Light from the sun

Some light comes out of light bulbs. But most of the light that we see comes out of the sun. The light starts out at the sun and then it comes to our planet. Do you remember what our planet is called? Yes, Earth.

Light moves very very very fast. It is the fastest thing in the whole universe! But the sun is very very very far away. After the light comes out of the sun, it does not get to Earth right away. It takes eight minutes to get here.

We need light to see. At night the sun is not in the sky and we don't see most of its light. That is why it is harder to see at night. But a little bit of the sunlight bounces off of the moon onto Earth. We call that light moonlight.

The next day

of off bounces bouncing different color strawberry together warm white blue brown green red goes eight

Light and sight

Last time we read that it takes eight minutes for light to get from the sun to Earth. At night, some of the sunlight bounces off of the moon and onto Earth. That way we get a little bit of light at night.

Light is always bouncing around. That is how we see things! We can see the moon when light bounces off of the moon and into our eyes. We can see a strawberry when light bounces off of the strawberry and into our eyes.

Light comes in different colors. The strawberry looks red to us because only red light bounces off of it. All of the rest of the light goes into the strawberry and warms it up a little bit.

When you mix green and blue and red paint together, you get brown paint. But when you mix green and blue and red light together, you do not get brown light. You get white light!

Two days later

Earth bounce bounces sometimes magnify magnifying off glass eye eyes through strange focus focusing water

Light and glass

Light comes from the sun to Earth. We see an apple when the light bounces off of the apple and into our eyes. Only green light bounces off of green apples. Only red light bounces off of red apples.

If you use a magnifying glass, some of the light goes through the magnifying glass before it goes into your eyes. The magnifying glass bends the light that goes through it. It bends it in a strange way, that we sometimes call focusing. That strange bending of the light can make small things look bigger!

Light also bends when it goes through water. Sometimes when you look at something through water it will look different. It might look like it is in a different place than it really is.

I will show you a magnifying glass after you finish reading this.

A couple of weeks later

-scope telescope through magnify magnifying probably spread eye

Telescopes at Night

When light goes through a magnifying glass, the light spreads out. When that spread-out light goes into your eye, the thing that it bounced off of looks bigger. Four hundred and twelve years ago, someone invented the telescope using two magnifying glasses.

We don't know the name of the person who invented the telescope, but they were probably Dutch. That Dutch inventor put one magnifying glass at the end of a long tube, and the other magnifying glass at the other end of the tube. When you looked through that tube, things that were far away seemed closer.

We don't know the name of the person who invented the telescope, but the first person to use a telescope to look at the night sky was named Galileo. When Galileo looked through a telescope, he saw things that no one had ever seen before. He saw the rings around Saturn!

She had seen those rings before. I didn't think she would know about Jupiter's moons.

The next day:

build building straight might eight heavy light Galileo Saturn Earth Italy Italian Pisa

Galileo in Pisa

Galileo spoke Italian. He lived in a city in Italy called Pisa. In Pisa there is a very famous building. It is a tall building that does not go straight up. It leans to one side. It looks like it might fall over! But it has not fallen over for eight hundred years.

That building is called the leaning tower of Pisa. There is a famous story about Galileo and the leaning tower of Pisa. Galileo was a real person but this might not be a true story. But it is a nice story.

Galileo wondered whether heavy things fall faster than light things. To find out, he went to the top of the leaning tower of Pisa, and he dropped a small stone and a big stone out of the window. People thought that the big stone would fall faster. But Galileo saw that the two stones fell at the same speed! He dropped them at the same time and they hit the ground at the same time.

A week later

-scope telescope microscope Galileo interesting -tion nutrition respiration digestion use used

Telescopes and microscopes

A piece of glass that can bend or spread out light, like a magnifying glass can, is sometimes called a "lens." When light went through Galileo's telescope it went through two lenses. Then it went into his eye. That way things that were really far away looked like they were closer. When he used the telescope to look at the sky he saw the rings of Saturn, and the moons of Jupiter.

Saturn is very, very big. It is a planet and it is bigger than the Earth! But you can also use lenses to see things that are very, very small. That kind of "scope" is called a "microscope." With a microscope, you can see cells!

Even though cells are so, so small, they are not simple. They have an inside and an outside, and there are lots of interesting things inside of them. They are alive! They need nutrition to live. They do respiration and digestion.

We are made of cells. What are cells made of?