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Michael Faraday, atoms, Disney vs. Ninjago - what a tangled web we weave 😃

7th and 8th of January, 2018
A very exciting question was posed yesterday. The little man wanted to know how electricity was made. This led to us looking into Michael Faraday's work and the Faraday suit on YouTube. We watched some great videos alongside Dick & Dom's 'absolute genius' about how electricity is made available to homes from the source, different sources of energy - renewable and non-renewable, role of transformers in reducing voltage and so on. Here's a link to this video - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyrNh4UXrWw&t=1087s


Today, we watched some videos about atoms as the next question was, "What makes magnets produce electricity when moved through a wire?" This was a video that we found to be quite engaging and informative about atoms -  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1RMV5qhwyE


The children talked a lot about the characters that there interested in and whether there were more male or female characters, whether they were portrayed as equally able and why this was or wasn't so. They had some discussions around the differences between Ninjago and Disney. 


Arian has long felt that Disney hasn't been fair in its portrayal of girls and women. This resulted in him dictating an email to me when he was five years old and my sending it off to Disney. He has felt that there is an unreal portrayal of body image in Disney films and storybooks. Here are the differences that they have listed:

DISNEY:

1. Female characters are often portrayed as weak, needing to be rescued (#proudmamamoment)
2. Females are shown as being physically weak and less smarter than the males
3. Male characters are the ones building and fixing things. They are also the ones finding solutions to problems quite often 

NINJAGO:  

1. Females and males are portrayed as equally strong
2. Nya, the female character, is considered to be stronger and more capable than the rest
3. Female character doesn't need rescuing and often fixes and finds solution to problems

It's interesting to see them starting to use critical thinking and analyses more often 😄 To cap it all, we had a great time exploring Corstorphine Hill, finding dens, looking at possible pug marks, stick-fighting and letting our imaginations run wild. 

An outdoor picnic in the freezing cold is always a big hit with these two. I couldn't get enough of the gorgeous sunset, the frozen ice on the leaves that looked like shards of glass & the magical and magnetic frozen droplets that looked like a crystal web woven by fairies.

                                                

                                                

                                                

                                           

                                     


The best learning for all us, happens when we are learning together as a family and there's no 'teaching'. #autonomouslearning #autonomyinchildren 

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