Let There Be Light!

One of our recent impulse purchases was a science kit on light. Larkin and Finn have loved doing the various experiments, including things like using a prism to separate sunlight into rainbows.

I always wonder how much they're absorbing (ha! light humor!) from these sorts of things, but I know something is getting through. An unsuspecting clerk at the grocery store asked Larkin what her favorite color was and Larkin replied, "Well, I don't really have a favorite color because I like so many, but if you're talking about light then I'd have to say white because it has all the colors of the rainbow in it."

Another big hit was coloring circles of paper with different colored crayons and attaching the disks to a small motor to see how they combined. So you take a disk like this:

And it becomes:

And one like this:

Becomes this:

They made lots of disks:

In other optical news, the recent lunar eclipse was visible out of the window at the top of our stairs. Emile managed to roust both kids from their sound early morning sleep and they sat and watched for about half an hour as the moon went from three quarters occluded to entirely gone and then waited long enough to make sure it would return.

The visuals are a little less spectacular on this one:

Larkin and Finn very excitedly made the eclipse connection to the "day of the black sun" in Avatar: The Last Airbender when the Fire Nation lost their power during a solar eclipse.