We homeschool our kids, and one of the fears that every homeschool parent has is “Am I screwing up my kid?” “Is my kid learning properly?” Today I saw some evidence that we’re doing ok.
While doing the dishes we were talking physics. I asked if they knew the three states of matter, and they did. Then we talked some about mass, and what it is.
Spinning it off into linguistics like I always do, I mentioned biomass, and asked if they knew what it was. My youngest said “Sounds like… wait a sec, what is biology the study of again?”
“Living things”, I said.
“Then it sounds like a measurement of the amount of living things in a space”.
The thing that makes me happy about this is that she was able to parse parts of words to derive the meaning of an entirely new word.
I think she’ll be all right.
But there are at least four states of matter: solid, liquid, gas, and plasma. There’s also the Bose-Einstein condensate.
We actually had a nice long talk about plasma as well, but I didn’t expect them to heave learned it yet. 🙂
I didn’t bring up the condensate.