I spent part of one morning last week talking with one of my kids' kindergarten class about space. Now, for those of you who have not spent time with the five-to-six year old set, kindergarteners are fascinating. They are clearly emerging as people with well defined personalities and outlooks, and they give the impression that they are at last inhabiting the same rational world in which most adults live. You can reason with them, making them ripe for discussions about scientific topics. For example, while they all had learned that the Sun was a star, and that real stars were "round" like the Sun, they had never really thought about the 3-dimensional shape of the Sun. The class was evenly divided between thinking the Sun was shaped like a ball, or that it was flat like a frisbee. But, after talking with them about how we orbit the Sun, and see it from different directions, they quickly deduced that it had to in fact be spherical. Incredibly gratifying. But then, the other aspect of kindergarteners is that while they seem to be living in the rational world, they're not really living there full-time. To wit, here are some of the comments that kids made when they raised their hands in response to various space-related questions: "Lava monsters could live there." "Um...um...um..." < looking down at feet for inspiration > "....shoes are made of metal." "And, um, I went camping, and it was dark, and there was stuff, and it was round, and I slept in a tent." "Um...yesterday....we saw owls...and one was big, and the other owl was small." My kid didn't care what anyone was saying, as long as she got to sing "The Sun is a mass of incandescent gas" (original version here).
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