All the Time in the World

I have no time for heedless hurry
I have no time for the hustler's bluff
I have no time for restless worry
I have all the time in the world for love
     -Fred Small, from "All the Time in the World"

Two things in the last two days have stood out as fun learning experiences. First, P and I watched Fly Away Home together. T joined in when he woke up from his nap. It's a movie rich in information unfamiliar but accessible (with a few explanations) to many kids: how birds imprint on the first living thing they see, how geese learn to migrate, how government "wildlife services" juggle protecting animals and catering to the preferences of humans, how the U.S. protects its borders, how land developers and environmentalists often come into conflict over wildlife habitat, and a bit about how ultralight aircraft are built and flown. P was horrified when she saw the bulldozer tearing up trees near the main character's home in Canada. I hadn't expected that level of reaction, but in hindsight, when you haven't grown up with the fight against clear-cutting, it really is horrifying to see healthy trees in a beautiful area torn apart and pulled up by their roots!

Yesterday all three of us spent the day at a local nature and science museum. I briefly debated whether to buy a year's membership, and I'm so glad I did. Beyond saving us money if we go more than a few times per year, it allowed me to be completely unfazed by the idea of taking an hour to go the first 50 feet into the museum. When you're trying to "do" a large part of a museum in a day, you miss so much! This way, I figured, if we only saw 1% of what the museum had to offer, that was just fine -- we could come back anytime, and the kids would get a chance to drill down to what was fascinating for them. We had all the time in the world.

Here are some of the things they found interesting:

• A collection of insect specimens, showing representative sizes and types for a dozen different classification groups
• A display on the life cycle of butterflies (To look up: what's the difference between a chrysalis, a pupa, and a cocoon in other metamorphosing animals? The display didn't have the level of detail we wanted on that.)
• A display of a few local animals, stuffed and beautifully displayed with artists' depictions of them alongside
• A window into the workings of the escalator -- We could see signs of past repair work and make guesses about how the parts we couldn't see might work.
• A display, with helpful explanations by a museum volunteer, of meteorites (The partial melting of the meteorites tied into what we learned about atmospheric re-entry from Apollo 13.)
• A machine that demonstrated impact crater formation, with some great photos of craters on the Earth and elsewhere
• A demonstration with a bell jar on how liquids boil in near-vacuum and actually cool off a bit in the process -- the demo was intended to show the effects on a human of a leaky space suit ("Space can really make your blood boil!"), and the presenter was a retired Lockheed engineer who worked on equipment that was used on the space shuttle. We had fun talking shop a bit after he finished his demonstration.
• That there used to be an ocean where we are now (just east of the Rocky Mountains)
• How the continents moved from a clustered shape (Pangaea) to their present locations
• How wood gets petrified
• That you can match up rock/fossil strata from different, nearby locations to form a more extensive regional fossil record
• That rocks have a low level of natural radioactivity (display with geiger counter)
• How natural selection works (We discussed this while watching a video loop of mudskippers and other fish who can move over land from one puddle to another if theirs is drying up or food is scarce, and who thus survive and reproduce more successfully than other fish who can't get around as well. The first fish who had the beginnings of that ability would have had a serious advantage over their less able kin, leading eventually to speciation.)
• That animals need oxygen and produce carbon dioxide, and plants do the opposite, so they can live together in closed systems (There was a model of an experiment with a mouse and a green plant.)
• How the formation of the ozone layer allowed for the development of life more complex than the original microbes that generated the oxygen that reacted to form ozone in the first place
• Handling some samples of dried peat -- these were on display with some mammoth fossils, because the fossils were found in wet peat. (This tied into the harvesting and use of peat as fuel, which we saw recently in The Secret of Roan Inish. We do watch fanciful movies sometimes, but even in them we usually find something to learn!)

I learned some of the arguments scientists have made to support dinosaurs having been warm-blooded: they lived in groupings typical of modern warm-blooded animals; they traveled pretty quickly and were quite active compared to modern cold-blooded animals; they cared for their young; and they grew quickly during their juvenile periods, like modern warm-blooded animals. The kids, to be honest, weren't that interested in this bit yet, but they were fascinated by the stegosaurus fossils found in Colorado when I was finishing college nearby. Who knew?

We stopped in the museum shop before leaving. P bought a necklace with color-changing "mood" beads. T picked out a bundle of rubber snakes. It will be fun to learn how the mood beads work and what kinds of snakes we are now harboring! I picked out a field guide to Colorado birds and The Big Book of Brain Games, a book of puzzles at many levels and in many areas including art, math, and science. We had a good time with the puzzle book after dinner last night. I think P has a knack for topology puzzles. A sidebar in the book quipped that a topologist is a person who can't tell the difference between a donut and a coffee cup. Can you see how they are the same? It took me a moment. UnschoolerDad pointed out that a human would also fall in that group of objects. We've both had fun playing with topology -- I heard about it from classmates in college and brainteaser books in high school, but I don't remember it being covered in any courses.

As I write, both kids are painting with watercolors. T just created a stunning, boldly-colored piece, very different from his recent all-linear color studies. I can't quite capture the full depth of color with my point-and-shoot, but here's my best effort: