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:
- One of the kids asked what the name ‘Australia’ meant. I’m embarrassed that I’ve never wondered that before, but now I did so we looked it up:
https://www.etymonline.com/word/australia
- We were learning the Latin numbers and noticed they seemed to be the roots for many of the month names. However, the numbers (7, 8, 9 and 10) were off by two months.
My sister told me that she learned in high school Spanish that the Romans had two “dead” months which meant they didn’t start their year until March. Now we were very intrigued. We went to the Almanac and found a whole lot of cool information on the months and their origins:
https://www.almanac.com/content/how-did-months-get-their-names
- While reading one of Grimm’s Fairy Tales, the beauty of the Nightingale’s song was once again brought up. Which got us to wondering – since we don’t live in a region with Nightingales – just what does this bird’s song sound like? It turns out, it is quite lovely!
- One of the kids was learning about gravity and air resistance and there was an illustration in the book that showed a feather and a rock falling at the same speed in a vacuum. He asked if that actually happens. We don’t have a vacuum chamber in the house, but we do have the inter webs:
As always, I more than enjoyed your entries,and will h old these gems next to my heart for the next time conversation runs dry (which will be my next conversation!)