Grandpa loved children. He always thought of things to do with his grandchildren that gave them a moment of peaceful bonding with nature in their young lives. During summer months Grandpa would swoop me up onto his shoudlers and take me for a walk down the 'back alley' on the way to the post office. He would ask me to tell him everything I saw in every backyard garden. Nothing was small and inconspicuous to me. Every backyard garden had a personality of its own. Every bee had work to do and every ladybug knew where her home was. (read more)

Bubbles and Beams

You can start studying light 's behavior when you are only 4! And, you can ride in bubbles on beams when you are???? Soon! That day is coming! Trust me! Entire communities are looking at solar transit systems.

 

 

Reflection is key to jewel beetle colors, scientists say

Have you ever seen a colorful beetle? The colors on some kinds of beetles are not from absorption of light by pigments. Rather, they are from reflection of light by the cells that make up the external skeleton. This one piece of research has set scientists in New Zealand to investigate the possibility of using this phenomenon to create a powdery mineral that can be sprinkled onto paper before it is printed as money. They hope this will help end counterfeiting.

Scientists in the car industry are investigating this phenomenon to produce cars that can change color, depending on a person's angle of view. 

Children make connections with nature by using simple inexpensive science tools like this pair of diffraction glasses. When they find a living system like a Blue Belly Lizard in their own back yard they understand how the lizard got his blue belly. Light Kit $9.95

How do diffraction glasses work? What is diffraction? What do the layers of the scales on butterfly wings, layers of feathers on a peacock have to do with the behavior of light? Where is the colored light coming from?

Here is one of our favorite poets for children. Betsy Franco reinforces the bounty that comes out of observation of nature.

Review

Come, explore the hidden shapes and patterns in nature. The peacock's flashy tail is a masterpiece of color and shape. A buzzing beehive is built of tiny hexagons. Even a snake's skin is patterned with diamond shapes.  

Buy Now — Save a tree..

It's an ebook! $9.95

SC#1111 Teach Your Own—-$9.95 in pdf, 9 MB in size-

 

"Margaret Mahy mixes acrobatic language and tongue-tangling rhymes to create her latest lighter-than-air offering." If you stop and think about what this author does you realize she uses language in a very effective way here. The words and rhythm pair perfectly with what a bubble really does. It bounces, it rolls, it lands and then takes off again. No one really can predict what will happen to it if it just travels on the capricious breeze.

 

 

 

 

Seeing Blue: Fish Vision Discovery Makes Waves In Evolutionary Biology

"It's amazing, but you can mix together this small number of genes and detect a whole color spectrum," Yokoyama says. "It's just like a painting."

Lower-cost Solar Cells To Be Printed Like Newspaper, Painted On Rooftops

Is he painting something? Nanoparticle 'inks' come to the rescue.

 

 

Milkweed Oil Tapped For Sunscreen And Other Products

The sunscreen's unique combination of fats and waxes may also qualify it as biodegradable and help keep it from washing off during a swim. Its current form is a clear liquid, but gels, creams, sticks and aerosol sprays are also possible, according to Harry-O'kuru.

 

LEDs May Help Reduce Skin Wrinkles

So, the science of light may help you too, mom! Want younger looking skin? Try visible light!

FDA Suggests New Sunscreen Standards

Scientists are working on an 'all-day' sunscreen. Someday, we'll have that. But, for now, you got to re-apply."

facts about sunscreen

Using Invisibility To Increase Visibility

A cat's eye ---

What can we see with a prism?

I See Light ~ I See Color

What children tell me when they look through a prism:

“Your nose is green on one side and purple on the other,” Chance yelled out. “Your hands are weird. Your thumbs are orange.” Chance and I were looking through a prism at one another for the first time and laughing. Some of the other children were watching the small animals playing on the ground in the bright summer light. “That squirrel is rainbowed,” they yelled out in excitement. “Hey, you’re way over there.”

Rose red light and lemon yellow light looked like they were pouring out of things; things like leaves, branches and shoe laces. Tangible things. Blueberry blue and grape purple layers of light as thick as your thumb curled around shadows. Intangible things. This tiny prism had suddenly rolled us out of our familiar world where leaves are green and noses are fleshed and we found ourselves eye deep in color, colored light.

Our familiar world was now very strange. Our everyday world had vanished. It had vanished with the blink of an eye. Trees were not barked. Instead, they were wrapped in red, orange and yellow light on one side of the trunks, and green, blue and purple light on the other side of the trunks. The yellow petals of the Black-eyed Susan of summer were rimmed with red light on one side and green light on the other side. Miner's lettuce along the meadow's edge was shining brilliantly with yellow light on one side of each leaf and blue light on the other side.

The children anxiously called out the names of the colors of light as if they were naming the colors in a new crayon box. "I see blue. I see red. I see green." I too began naming colors of light while imagining that I was looking, not at colors in a crayon box, but rather, at the vivid red of expanding universes and the mysterious blue of nuclear energy, of spectra of colored light streaming out of the atoms in the stars, the rocks under my feet, the matter in my hair, my skin-- every tiny piece of matter in my body.

'It's like Disneyland,"Jill shouted in a rush of excitement. "There’s color everywhere I look."

"It's like fairyland." Serene stood close to me, quietly looking through her prism at the summered meadow in amazement. "I want to take this, all of this, to heaven with me," She whirled around to Nissa with a boldness that was at odds with the soft folds of her ballerina skirt. "Fairyland," she squealed out.

"Light. It's light. It's everywhere." Joshua could not wait to show his mother. "It's on the bark. See. It's on the flowers, and on my hands even." He shoved one of his hands out in front of him, displaying it boldly as if showing her his muscles.

What we mothers were experiencing was the sound of untamed excitement of our children with nature's ways, especially her ways with waves of light energy passing through a 2 inch piece of plastic. No piece of plastic had ever seduced our children to carry on like this. Their yells and squeals reminded me of my yells and squeals when I first discovered colored light through a piece of plastic. Less than the price of cotton candy at a summer fair, each of these prisms held the key to open the gate to inquiry, to exploration-- to a generously colored palate that is ever present in every leaf, shoelace and puffy cloud in the sky overhead.

“What is really happening anyway inside this prism?" Joshua’s mother asked me while looking at a young redwood through a prism of her own. To read my explanation go to: StarChild Science: Teach Your Own

This ebook is designed to provide you with a new path to understanding energy. By experiencing the behavior of light energy a clear understanding of what light energy is all about will result for both you and your child. As one homechooling mom in Sealy, Texas recently wrote: "I love your book. I like it because you start with light. I think everything is linked to the energy of light. Einstein discovered that and from that discovery we have all the thousands of wonderful technologies at our fingertips. That's why I like your work. You have made it so simple for all of us non-science moms." Lisa, homeschooling mom of a 10 year old girl.

The prism, flashlight and diffraction glasses are only $9.95. Your child can experience both refraction and diffraction as well as have a perfect little flashlight all his/her own!

Click on any of these images to go to catalog.

I find that when a prism is made to go around a child's neck, it is far less prone to being lost or damaged. I drill a prism at the top and glue an eye into it. Then I string a cord through the eye so a child can wear the prism around his neck. You never know when you might want to look at something through a prism.

“The best way I can answer your question about light traveling through a prism and producing a spectrum is to go back to a childhood experience that I had in the cob-weather of Saskatchewan, Canada. When I was around ten I would sit for hours at a time on the top of a hill and watch a vast field of wheat sway in the wind. I was captivated as ripples in the wheat grew then disappeared, grew once again then disappeared.

"I was mesmerized as I watched wave after wave travel through the wheat field without once carrying with it a single blade of wheat. Even as young as I was, I intuitively knew that each wave was not a thing, tangible thing like a piece of gum or a bicycle. It was not made of some material stuff. Each wave was energy that was moving, moving through the wheat field. And this movement had a pattern. It created areas of high activity with calm areas in between. And these highs and lows moved through the field continuously.

“When we relocated down to California, I found myself watching ocean waves for whole afternoons at a time under blue, sunny skies. Again, I noticed not a single piece of kelp, not one sea otter or boat would be carried along with a wave. They, like the blades of wheat, were left behind. I could see that

the waves were not the ocean just as they were not the wheat. They passed through the ocean just as they had passed through the wheat. I didn't know it at the time but I was watching each ocean wave borrow the water as it traveled through the water just as I had watched each wheat wave borrow the wheat as it traveled through the wheat. I was twelve years old before I found myself not thinking of things anymore but thinking of non- things, not of thinking of tangible objects to thinking of processes. I guess you can say I started feeding on 'process' then and it has captivated my attention ever since."

I reached into my lessons basket and drew out a diagram of a wave. “The energy we call light also travels in the form of a wave. Each wave of light has high parts called crests and low parts called troughs. Ups and downs. This is a pattern that all waves have.

"A wave is an interesting phenomenon in that it is larger than itself. It can separate itself from its source and carry information away. Remember the light from the flashlight? Waves of light carried information away from the flashlight and entered our jars, some of it went through the bottom of our jars and lit up our tee shirts.

"Notice in this diagram that a wave has an up and a down to it. A wavelength is made up of an up, a crest, and a down, a trough. As it moves along it manifests a frequency, the number of ups and downs that pass a certain point in a unit of time, say one second. Our eyes have cone shaped cells in the back of the retina that can respond to a range of frequencies from red light all the way to the higher frequencies of violet light. This is the visible spectrum. As you go from red light to violet light the wavelengths become shorter and shorter while frequency and energy increase. When the cone shaped cells are stimulated by these frequencies they send chemical messages to the brain and the brain interprets these messages as 'colored light'."

Joshua’s mother interrupted me with such abruptness it startled me. “So a white beam of visible light like from the flashlight is a mixture of seven visible colors. And each color has its own wavelength.“

“Yes." I reached into my lessons basket again and took out a model of a lightbeam I had invented for the children. I called over to Nissa and asked her to hold it up to her eye and bend it. "This lightbeam is just a

model. Models are used all of the time in science to help illustrate certain phenomena. "Nissa, bend the white ribbon slightly and let's see what happens to the colored ribbons inside of it." She obliged and bent the lightbeam ever so slightly. "Oh my. The colors separate out and now you can see all seven of them." Joshua's mother wanted a lightbeam of her own so we set about making one for her.

As we closed the edges of her lightbeam firmly with masking tape, Nissa began to draw a rainbow on the white ribbon of her own lightbeam. "I know what I'm going to do with my lightbeam. I'm going to hang it around my neck so everybody can see what happens to white light when I bend it," she told Joshua's mother.

“I see now. With that model I can see that visible light is made up of seven different colors or wavelengths. And when white light bends all the seven different wavelengths separate out into a spectrum." Joshua's mother leaned in closer to the lightbeam and added, "I can see the order too."

"After entering the prism all of these different colors, all of these different wave- fronts of light are bent, or as scientists say, 'refracted’, by different amounts. This bending causes the wave- fronts to change direction.” I reached into my lessons basket again and pulled out an illustration for her to follow. “Take a close look at this illustration of the bicycle wheels and the sidewalk.”

She turned to the illustration and immediately saw what she had seen many times with Joshua while watching him ride his tricycle in front of their house. "This is a familiar scene for me. Whenever one of the wheels of Joshua's tricycle would drift off the sidewalk and into the grass he always turned and slowed down. If he was going real fast his tricycle would tip over and he would end up crying."

"This picture gives the classical description of what happens to light as it travels through a prism. The path of light changes direction just like Joshua's path changed direction when one wheel went into the grass. When this happens to a wave-front of light it sets the stage for a change in speed."

"Oh, yes, that too. Joshua always lost speed when one wheel got caught in the grass."

"The same thing happens with light going through a prism. As it travels through the prism the straight beam of white light bends. The red end of the spectrum with its long wavelengths bends more than the violet end of the spectrum with short wavelengths.” I watched her raise the prism up in front of her eyes and stare at layers of red and orange light on top of Joshua’s blond hair.

"Each color of light, each wavelength of visible light, now travels at a different speed. This creates a 'speed gradient' inside the prism. Some wavelengths of visible light are now traveling slower than others. The 'speed gradient' allows the wavelengths to separate, creating a multicolored band or spectrum. This spectrum of colors is then scattered inside the prism. The same thing happens with drops of water to make a rainbow."

"I can see that there is energy, the energy of light, and information, The Information here is in the form of a spectrum isn't it?"

"Very good. Yes. That's the information. Now you are getting the hang of it."

"It is an interesting world, this world of light waves. I had no idea all these things were happening with light and the prism. I can't believe it." The degree of her own ignorance had suddenly magnified in front of her. "But I do want to be able to answer Joshua's questions about the world as he grows up. The other day he asked me about the energy crisis. I really couldn't tell him much because I don't understand it. And now, coming into this class all I hear about is energy and information. It sounds to me like there is no energy crisis. There is energy everywhere." (click on rainbow picture to see video of children making a model of a light beam)

"Energy is abundant in universe. You are right. It is just that we have depended on one kind of energy source that is finite. There is a limit to how much fossil fuel there is under the surface of the earth. There is only so much oil available. We didn't realize this soon enough."

"The news media is flooded with news about rising gasoline prices, with stories about disastrous things that are going to happen in the near future because we are running out of oil." She found herself frightened and overwhelmed again. She often wondered what life was going to be like for Joshua's children and their children. Would we ever get out from under these terrible times? she asked herself frequently.

"I'm an optimist. I think we can make it but it isn't going to be easy. Our children are going to have to understand nature's ways much better than the schools are preparing them to if they are going to solve the problems we have created. To my way of thinking, if our children understood that energy and information are what is between nature and themselves then they would not be put off by science. They would realize that universe is full of energy. Energy is everywhere. To me, this one realization would inspire them to find other sources of energy. There is no shortage. Not really."

"To read more conversations with parents read our ebook , StarChild Science: Teach Your Own."

"What is happening in this drawing you made, Julia?"

"Well, one girl is holdiing a jar and another girl is shining a light into the jar." Is that co-operation or what?

"Why? What are they going to see?"

StarChild Science: Teach Your Own

Find out in our ebook how children begin to understand the behavior of light by doing what children naturally do anyway--- explore.

Chapter2

Two Sides of the Same Coin

Now that we know a little bit about how light behaves, it is time to take a look at the behavior of electrons and magnetism

The articles you see on this web site act as activities and explanations of smaller topics within each main idea. For example, the articles on light you read about below act as explanations on the behavior of light.

Scientists Control Living Cells With Light

After you read this article talk to your child about the implications of using light to heal. Allow your child to imagine being involved in science research and how powerful a job that can be. Or, imagine being a science fiction writer and one of the heroes in your story needs another eye. He shines a light into his empty socket and voila-- a new eye forms. Remember, good science fiction has real science in it. Inspire your child to think about science as a potential career. It's not that hard. It just takes a few moments to read an article, think about it, then approach your child with an idea you read in the article that got you excited.

What would be the perfect “green” home?

The Cliffs Cottage has a geothermal heating and cooling system, which is the most environmentally responsible and energy efficient system available.

Confused by SPF? Take a Number

If adequately applied, sunscreens with sky-high SPFs offer slightly better protection against lobster-red burns than an SPF 30. But they don’t necessarily offer stellar protection against the more deeply penetrating ultraviolet A radiation, or so-called aging rays. Are these new high SPFs lulling consumers into a false sense of security?

The contracts amount to the world’s largest single deal for new solar energy capacity

Just wait one minute! You mean that on one sunny day this array of mirrors will supply 1,300 megawatts of electricity, somewhat more than a modern nuclear power plant?

Using Invisibility To Increase Visibility

A cat's eye and glow-in-the-dark clothing are effective because they send light back from where it came...

FDA Suggests New Sunscreen Standards

Scientists are working on an 'all-day' sunscreen. Someday, we'll have that. But, for now, you got to re-apply."

Metamaterials Found To Work For Visible Light

This 6 year old already knows you can bend light. She has even made a model of a white lightbeam and bends it to show the spectrum of colored light inside. So, she will be able to understand the science behind this article about bending light in a few years. StarChild Science gets to the basics early. We encourage a teacher and parent to make a model of a beam of light with a child to encourage a child to imagine what a white lightbeam must be like.

Seeing Blue: Fish Vision Discovery Makes Waves In Evolutionary Biology

"All fish previously studied have retained UV vision, but the Emory researchers found that the scabbardfish has not." What does this mean to a middle school student who is interested in biology?

Lower-cost Solar Cells To Be Printed Like Newspaper, Painted On Rooftops

Bubbles and Beams

It isn't far away. Today's generation of students is the first generation of students that will be able to ride bubbles along beams to school, work, play!

Milkweed Oil Tapped For Sunscreen And Other Products

Harry-O'kuru devised a procedure for using zinc chloride to catalyze the conversion of milkweed oil's triglycerides into ultraviolet (UV)-light-absorbing compounds called cinamic acid derivatives.

LEDs May Help Reduce Skin Wrinkles

...by changing the molecular structure of a glue-like layer of water on elastin, the protein that provides elasticity in skin, blood vessels, heart and other body structures.

Cloak of invisibility: Fact or fiction?

McCain is right! Change is coming. Big time! Soon we will be able to make certain things invisible by interfering with the waves of light coming off of objects.

Broccoli Sprout-derived Extract Protects Against Ultraviolet Radiation

...humans can be protected against the damaging effects of ultraviolet (UV) radiation -- the most abundant cancer-causing agent in our environment -- by topical application of an extract of broccoli sprouts.

Screen-printed Solar Cells In Many Colors And Designs, Even Used In Windows

The solar cells also can be used on windows, providing shading from glare while generating electricity.

 

"satisfying a child's insatiable curiosity" Cheryl Block

 

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All right reserved - Judy Wilken MS - 2010

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