Science and stuff.

 Today we took advantage of A having the week off work to have a family day out and went to Woolsthorpe Manor, home of Isaac Newton.  The manor itself wasn't open today, but the main attraction was the science centre, so we'd decided to go anyway.  The girls and I had been before just over 12 months ago but it was A's first time. 

Despite being half term, it wasn't too busy and we all enjoyed playing/experimenting with the various things to do there.

There was this, where you tried to move the paddle to track the red line on the graph.  There were three tasks.  The first had time and distance on the graph and a straight line, so you had to move the paddle at a constant speed of 5cm/sec.  The second was again time and distance, but it started still for the first 3 seconds and then accelerated over the remaining time.  The final graph plotted time against speed, with a straight diagonal line, so you had to accelerate at a constant rate.  Very tricky indeed!

K having a go.

As you would expect, there were plenty of experiments to have a go at to do with light.  There was one with prisms, first to separate white light into the visible spectrum and then you could block all but the red light and show that it can't be separated further.  Another one you could first separate white light into the rainbow and then converge them back into white light.

In another area there were various different shapes of lenses and mirrors with which to bend and reflect light.

Like this!

I had an interesting conversation with K about this display. 

It talks about whether light is a particle or a wave and explains that current thinking is that it is neither but sometimes behaves like a particle and other times like a wave.  K's response to this was 'Like a non-Newtonian fluid', meaning that it sometimes behaves like a solid, sometimes like a liquid, but is neither.

In other news, we finished The Wee Free Men and have started reading Five Children on the Western Front, which is a recently written sequel by Kate Saunders to E Nesbit's The Five Children and It books, set at the start of the First World War.

K is still going with the FutureLearn course that she is doing, Start Writing Fiction and has also been on Khan Academy quite a lot, particularly looking at the maths doodling videos, which she loves.  She has also been making her own hexaflexagons.

Finally, I'm going away for a few days!  It's the first time I'll have left the girls for more than one night and the first time leaving the country without them.  I'm going to Norway with my choir, which I'm both excited and a bit nervous about.  The girls have lots planned with A and will be absolutely fine, although they aren't too keen on my going.