Children are naturally curious creatures and with so many under one roof coupled with the fact that we homeschool, we are frequently looking things up to answer the various questions that arise. For instance, the children found that one of the chickens had laid an egg the size of a cherry tomato. We looked it up and found out that such an egg occurs on occasion, that there is no yolk inside and that they are called – by some – fairy eggs.
Here are some other fairy eggs we found this week:
- We were learning about how the Atomic Bomb ended WWII and the kids wanted to see what the bomb looked like. That led to discussion of the destruction and horrors it caused which led to a discussion about the advent of Godzilla. Here was a fairly comprehensive summation of the Atom Bomb by the History Channel:
https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/bombing-of-hiroshima-and-nagasaki
- One of my sons just finished reading By the Great Horn Spoon by Sid Fleischman. It’s a book about a young orphan from the east coast hoping to strike gold during the California Gold Rush in order to save his Aunt’s house. We were interested to learn that at the time – and if you could afford it – traveling by boat and going around the southern tip of South America was the safest and fastest way to get to California from Boston. Here’s a comparison of some of the travel routes used during the Gold Rush:
https://goldrushofcalifornia.weebly.com/travel-routes.html
- While reading about Jefferson’s presidency and Madison’s presidency, we learned about the death of Alexander Hamilton via a duel with Aaron Burr. The school textbook didn’t provide a whole lot of detail (probably because it’s written for children), so we had to go online to flesh things out a bit (children are curious about unusual deaths). We found out that dueling was illegal by that time and that nobody knows exactly what went down in that particular duel – only that Hamilton came out of it with a mortal wound and Burr was never legally punished for killing him.
https://allthatsinteresting.com/hamilton-burr-duel
- My son found a large-ish fossilized shell in some of the limestone we have around our backyard “garden” (in quotes because nothing will grow in it on account of the children, chickens and dogs refusing to stay out of it). I told him that there used to be a sea covering this part of the country.
There is a lot of cool stuff on the Western Interior Seaway (the sea that used to cover the midwest), but I’ll only post two of the cooler links. The first is an overview and the second has a lot of information on the sort of monsters that used to populate the sea:
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