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Newton, gravity, density - the importance of autonomous learning

17/01/2018

We have had a busy and very interesting day today with a visit to our GP and then the Sick kids hospital to check if the older one's elbow had been fractured. Luckily, she's fine and will heal within a week or so from a minor injury. We have also had a trip to the garage to check the bodywork on our car as we were involved in a minor accident yesterday. Everyone is fine, thankfully. These appointments meant that the older one was off from school and there were a lot of questions about how x-rays were taken and observing the process, understanding why we had to go to different garages to get an estimate for the car and so on. 

The most engaging aspect of autonomous or self-directed learning is the confidence it instils in children to pursue a line of thought, seek answers and explore that topic as much or as little as they would like to, and in a manner that they are comfortable doing. 





Arian has been ruminating a lot about the things that he sees around him, such as electricity, where it comes from and how it's made. I will write about this in a separate blog post. He also loves making potions or 'portions' as he refers to them. He loves watching liquids mix, adding colours to it and trying to make them gooey or explode 😃

After a very successful experiment carried out by him and Ashaanka, which involved an exploding volcano made up of baking soda and vinegar a couple of weeks ago, he was quite keen to continue making his new potion. He was having a shower and he suddenly exclaimed out loud, "Ashaanka, what will happen if we mixed oil and water? Shall we find out?" This led to my shouting out loudly from the other room that experiments needed to be carried out over the sink or on the floor with newspapers underneath. I also suggested that they could try using some food flavourings and anything else available in the baking cupboard, which is always easily accessible in case either or both of them wanted to do some baking. 

Since Ashaanka had buried her nose into one of her books, off he went and decided to mix oil and water first. He decided he liked the 'chemical reaction' he had witnessed and then decided to add sugar, rum, baking soda, conditioner, soap, honey, vanilla essence and voila! - a repulsive-looking and semi-aromatic potion had been concocted. We noticed that even after thoroughly spooning the mixture, certain layers were formed. He noticed that oil and honey were visible on the surface and when I asked him what a mixture was and if only one substance made up a mixture, he stated that a mixture needed to have two or more substances. 

While wondering why layers were present and oil floated on water, we decided to look up some youtube videos. We ended up learning about density and understanding that large objects such a log of wood can float on water but small objects such as pins can sink. He mulled over the sizes and was amazed that this could happen and that it wasn't to do with bigger objects being heavier in relation to where they are placed. This was when we discovered more about atoms being more tightly packed in smaller objects in relation to a medium, in this case, water. To visualise, since he was already interested in atoms and we had looked up why magnets produce electricity when moved through a copper wire (my post about Faraday is coming up soon), we imagined that atoms were hugging each other more tightly in that tiny space. Hence, this added more weight to a tiny object such as a safety pin and it sank in water. Arian felt that atoms clumped more or 'huggled' together as he refers to hugging + cuddling, possibly because they were scared. This made us ponder whether everything around us had emotions, since everything is made up of atoms. He felt that it was possible that the atoms in a log of wood were more chilled out or maybe didn't like each other, and so, they were further apart.  


We then started browsing through videos on youtube about this topic and came across an interesting video about Isaac Newton and his discovery of gravity. It was a nice video about why we are able to walk on the earth and what keeps the planets in our solar system in orbit and who Newton was. Here's a link if it's of interest - https://youtu.be/xmJoPCZj1_Q. The kids were thrilled to see that Newton apparently liked throwing himself off a small rock to see if he could fly, to see what would happen and why he would fall onto the ground. Arian was very thrilled as he found he had that in common with Newton and he was thrilled when I confessed that it was one of my favourite pastimes as a kid.

Questions always seem to lead to loads of explorations and reflections. When there is no time limit to ponder and questions lead to more questions and hence, more reflections, the world is your oyster. #autonomouslearning #autonomyinchildren  

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