Stinky cold and seeing things.

Today was set fair to be one of those days that just drift along and we don't do any overtly 'learny stuff', which given my head feels like it's stuffed full of mouldy cotton-wool due to a really stinky cold would have been fair enough quite frankly.  This morning I read a couple more chapters of Harry Potter (and the Goblet of Fire if you've forgotten and are interested), while K & M played with playmobil (dinosaurs for M, something she hasn't done for a while, new campervan for K).  Then after a quick and easy lunch, I suggested we could have a look at a couple of videos on The Happy Scientist.  K & M were up for this and we watched one explaining the difference between mass and weight and then a couple of others including this free one (it's $20 for the year for lots more videos, which I think is very good value), which shows that you can trick your eyes and brain into briefly seeing a black and white photo as colour.  I suggested that we could have a look in our non-fiction books (which I've got back out again in the hope that we might get back into our body project!) after we'd been out to the library and shops (M needed new trainers).  M decided she wasn't interested but K was, so we had a look at the section on eyes in one of our books, including the part about the rod and cone receptors of the retina, the latter being the ones you trick in the video we watched.  We also looked at the anatomy of our eyes and showed that there is a blind spot, where there aren't any of those receptors because it's where the optic nerve leaves the eye to take the messages to the brain, by doing something similar to this from the book.  After A picked K up from ballet, we were eating our tea and telling him about what we'd been up to today and K demonstrated very clearly that she'd understood what we looked at when she clarified and corrected things I told him, having decided that she'd rather I told him instead of her!