Thursday, September 6, 2018

Grade 8 is making my head spin and it's only Day Two

In case I ever forget... I love homeschooling!

Today we started reading our Science book, dealing with the history of scientific discovery. My youngest asked if we could make water for ourselves from hydrogen atoms and oxygen atoms. As I flipped 300 pages into the book to the page about the Krebs Cycle, he went on to explain about wanting to build cities on places like the moon and Mars because of "overpopulation". We ended up talking about whether the world is really overpopulated or if we just don't handle our resources well, which led to a discussion on why people live where they live, which led to a discussion on the history of human population growth, geologic features, climate in different regions, and human nature.

He couldn't stop asking questions, though. Eventually he started theorizing about creating a black hole so he could create artificial gravity which led to a discussion about what is known and what is unknown and how much of what we can really know about what we don't know... And then suddenly we were looking at dark matter and dark energy and where these concepts came from and whether it's ever been observed before...

At this point he smirked at me and remembered that in the science class at camp this year, he asked a lot of questions. "I think my favourite time was when I put my hand up to ask another question - I had to go to the bathroom. Greg seemed disappointed."

Oh this kid! There's so much to talk about!