Let There Be Light

Emily's enjoying our light topic a lot, I think. Yesterday we spent all day working on that, apart from Emily's maths whizz session in the morning. Before lunch, we looked at mirrors and how they can be used to control/direct rays of light. We borrowed Gramps' laser pointer and set up mirrors to bounce it around the dining room, then we dragged a very busy Daddy away from his desk to come and assist with bouncing a torch beam from the mirror in the hall all the way around the room and up the stairs in the corner. Lots of fun!

In the afternoon, we spent some more time looking at light and colour. Emily experimented with colour filters and a torch - she found several brightly coloured objects, darkened the room and tried looking at them with different filters applied to the torch, and discovered that when using the red filter, for instance, the other objects virtually disappeared. She understands that this is because the red object appears red to us because it's reflecting red light and absorbing the other colours - so it's looks fine through a red filter, but the other objects are absorbing red light, not reflecting is, so they appear black. We spoke at length about how a filter only allows light of that colour to pass through it, and experimented with shining a torch through different pairs of filters in turn to prove that a blue filter gives a blue dot of light but that blue dot of light can't pass through a red filter onto the white paper. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Then for fun, Emily went off with the filters and her camera and took lots of photos around the house and garden. When she has time she wants to set up a still life group of objects and photograph them with different filter combinations before putting them together in a sort of pop art montage.
Yesterday evening was yoga, and Emily came out with some exciting news - at Easter, her group is putting on a yoga play. Apparently they've all got lots of lines to learn and complicated vinyassas to perform. :-))

This morning we were due at the opticians at 9am but we woke up and saw "the snow" and changed our minds - there wasn't much of it, after all, and it would have been a waste not to play in before it vanished ;-) Here's Emily, Romeo and Juliet enjoying what little of it there was. It was all gone by mid afternoon! The big cats were too sensible to go out in it ;-)


We didn't have time for work this afternoon, as we were making scrummy wholemeal jam buns in time for Kate and her Mum to arrive for tea and a play. Emily and Kate played shops, did lots of drawing and dancing and generally had a lovely time. Margaret took video of a lot of their giggling - they're leaving for Poland on Monday and may not be back until June, and since Kate's sad at leaving Emily behind, we thought some video would be a nice idea for her to take with her. Can't wait until they get back! Margaret and I had a long chat and I brought her and Kate's natal charts up on screen for her to have a look at too.

Also today, I finished the educational report I was going to send to the LEA following their super polite letter in November - we decided that we'd send them one even though they pointed out they knew it was entirely voluntary, as we'd like to maintain the good (i.e. they leave us alone, lol) relationship we now seem to have with them. It's 16 pages long........but then, when I went to write the covering letter, I found that I've lost their original letter so I don't have the contact information anyway! Still, it was interesting to write :-)