Wall-y

TEAR DOWN THE WALL: Not sure what you did before breakfast this morning, but CJ was busy with a life-imitates-art project centering on Pink Floyd's "The Wall."

He sat at the breakfast table eating cereal, "The Wall" streaming into his head via ear buds, playing Minecraft. But it wasn't any random exercise. Rather, I noticed one of the things he was constructing was an enormous brick wall ("all in all you're just another brick in the wall").

He spent the first 25 tracks of the album building up his Floydian Minecraft world and then when "The Trial" came on, with its refrain of "Tear down the wall! Tear down the wall!" he did just that, destroying what he'd worked to create.

Fun way to start the day, I'd say.

AFTERWORD: We finally watched the video with parting thoughts from Lou Broomfield, "our" physics professor. In it, he asked students to send him a postcard, so today the kids each picked one out.

I think I'm also going to put the postcards in an envelope along with a thank you from me, and send the prof a page or two of the kids' notes. I think a guy who usually teaches classes of 20+ somethings at the University of Virginia would get a kick out of seeing how 8- and 10-year olds process his physics lessons.

PLOTTING: We are finally getting to the Week 2 lectures in our Einstein class. Last week was basically biographical material, but things are starting to get complicated rather quickly. We're plotting in three dimensions and noodling over how to synchronize clocks. I hope we can keep up.

As we were learning about spacetime diagramming today, out of nowhere Annabelle said, "I have an idea for a Scratch project!" (Scratch being a programming platform.) I can't believe how quickly she came up with it!

You have to click on the green flag to launch the program.


If you click on the "see inside" button when you're on the page (here: http://beta.scratch.mit.edu/projects/10112530/) you can see all of the steps she had to connect in order for it to work.

OUTSIDE THE BOX: The sun came out this afternoon and the kids spent two-plus hours out in it. As infrequent as it appears, when it's here, we tend to blank out the schedule and get out in it.

Annabelle was very excited to discover a caterpillar hanging out on a bubble wand. Rosy cheeked, she ran into the house to fetch me to come see it.  My photo of it didn't turn out - sorry. I can report that it looked very much like a caterpillar.