Friday, March 27, 2009

We're doing something different these days

We start with a magazine article. Our current selection of magazines includes Popular Science, Equus, National Geographic, and Horse Illustrated. I thought we'd cycle through the magazines, one article per day. Ha! Little did I know how much would come from this simple exercise.

Day 1: We read about SpaceX's new Falcon 9 in Popular Science. Not only did we learn really cool things like SpaceX was established in 2002 with the goal of increasing space travel by decreasing cost (Come on, just how cool is that?), that the same flight which costs $120 million on the Ariane 5 costs only $58 million on the Falcon 9, and that SpaceX has a contract with NASA for at least 12 launches to carry cargo to the International Space Station, but it brought up the questions, "How big is the International Space Station? How many people live on it? What do they do?" I wrote the questions down then we continued to read from Popular Science. (We read about a cell phone with a built in projector that can project a 100" image, and a fish that utilizes mirrors to see what's to the side and bottom of it - the brownsnout spookfish.)

Day 2: We looked up answers to yesterday's questions, but our list of questions grew. "What's the longest space stay? How do they go to the bathroom? How did the ISS start and when?" At 45 minutes I had to call an end to ISS research as Math was calling. (Okay, it was calling me.)

The plan is to wind up ISS questions tomorrow and move on to an article in one of the horse mags, or National Geographic.

Overheard today...

7 yo daughter: "You're a boy, she's a girl. Completely different species."
12 yo son: "We're the same species."
7 yo daughter: "But different sex." (Said as though that explained everything.)