No, this isn’t something about pencils – just what happened this morning.
Things are slowly getting back to normal, although it’s a new normal in a nice way. Tonight the table and chairs returned from the shed because the birth pool was collected yesterday by a superhuman courier chap who didn’t have to unpack the huge boxes at all before he could carry them into his van (unlike me!). This morning was another of those nice things that you have to keep in mind for when the little dears are whiny or trying to kill each other.
While the oldest three were having breakfast J asked out of the blue “Why is water H2O?” I was in a hurry to get to work (usually it doesn’t matter if I’m a few minutes late, but today I had to be on time) but it was too good an opportunity to let it lie – child led learning and all that. So I got the O Level Chemistry down from my mental attic, hunted for some suitable books, gave up and so switched on the computer and found a nice site about the periodic table, and Wikipedia helped me to remember how many electrons each shell could take.
J already knows a bit about atoms, and that they have protons, neutrons and electrons, so I drew a picture of an oxygen atom (without the neutrons) and put the electrons in shells: oh look, two gaps in the outer one (bit of bonus maths: 8-6). Also a picture of a hydrogen atom: one gap. Atoms want full outer shells and can share electrons with other atoms to fill them up. Gaps match up with each other (an explanation which probably makes someone who actually understands this twinge), so it takes two hydrogens to fill up the oxygen, hence H2O. Then we did carbon dioxide: oh look – carbon has four gaps so it’s CO2. K worked this one out, which was great. Finally helium – see, it has a full outer shell so it doesn’t need to share with anything, which means it doesn’t react with much. All the elements in the same column as helium all have full outer shells, so they’re like each other and don’t react much.
And then they finished breakfast ;).
Fortunately I managed to zoom to work in time and so didn’t have to apologise to the visiting Big Cheese for being late due to helping my children with their education. 🙂
