April Homeschool Miscellany

I tried to get J to organise this month's excursion to a cave in a national park that is not that far away from us in the grand scheme of things.  I had organised it mostly for 14yo but I had misunderstood, he had some vague interest in oldschool mines which was related to an interest in blacksmithing but didn't like caves, and neither did anyone else so that idea got nixed.

Late March saw some rehearsing for a performance for one of the local shows, and the show (and performance) itself happened in early April.  Both 18yo and 16yo were in it, and 16yo also got roped in to help with hair and makeup.

The performance went well after a minor hiccup at the start (there was a brief scuffle where the laptop being used to drive the sound system wouldn't read the usb stick, and when that got resolved the tech guy did a sound test and everything was fine til the person doing the music tried to play it for the actual thing and it wouldn't start, and the tech guy had to get called back to fiddle with equipment til it worked again).

There was a total solar eclipse this month but it could only be viewed from up north.  I had had some vague plans to go back to the Gravity Discovery Centre for that to watch the livestream and the people giving presentations but it managed to slip my mind til the actual day, and we ended up putting on the NASA livestream to keep an eye on it instead, and made pinhole things to view it with.

We also had a look at the chickens with 14yo's one.

They worked out quite well (though one has to squint a bit to find the crescents in this one).

Then J found a better flat surface to project onto in the form of an old bathtub sitting outside waiting for us to one day have money to get renovations done to our other bathroom so it can get put back in.

The rest of the day was observing the changing light conditions from normal to "weird" (as there was only 70% coverage in the metro area) back to normal and 14yo discussed the mechanics of the eclipse with J and they also went into a lot of dicussion about how to know if what you're observing is really happening, and how to analyse data and things to try to separate fact from propaganda, and also trying to avoid skewing, cherrypicking and ignoring data because they don't support the narrative one wants to believe.  I don't know if there was much more beyond that as they wandered off out the back while talking.

We also tied in some very brief discussions around Norse and Asian mythology of large animals eating the sun (Fenrir the wolf god and dragons respectively) and then once more went sciencey with it and how perhaps the people in the past had slightly misjudged the distance the sun was as a dragon big enough to eat the sun probably wouldn't notice the loud banging of pots and pans that were supposed to scare it off.