Day 18 - Who's excited?

At the School of Dad we sometimes have a hard time figuring out who is learning more. We have been exploring weather under the guidance of my brother, a high school science teacher. The past couple of weeks we have been studying how the earth is unevenly heating. Today in the final step before putting all of the pieces together we examined the orbit of the earth around the sun. We did this at a fortuitous time, with the Autumnal Equinox being yesterday. Using a model and applying things that we know, we were able to draw some conclusions about what the earth’s orbit looks like. Ben followed and understood the process. It was certainly not new to me, but I was the one excited about the investigation. In examining the equinox we found a website that showed sunrise/sunset time as well as the angle of the sun and distance from the sun at solar noon. We compared the data with the spring equinox, summer solstice and winter solstice. We also look at how the data looked different in locations nearer and farther from the equator. I thought it all was very cool. Ben was mostly nonplussed.

I wish I could figure out what we could do that would generate in Ben the interest and excitement that I was feeling.