Obsessed with Astronomy

Lately, Reese has a  ravenous appetite for knowledge and also being creative. He is into astronomy especially astrophysics. He reads about galaxies, stars, planets, exoplanets, the interstellar medium and etc...

My knowledge of space is confined to the names of the planets in our solar system! So when Reese started asking me things like heliopause, spaghettification and singularity.... I went bonkers. 

I took Reese to the Science centre and borrowed some books on astronomy. He has been reading them and told me even more stuff which I have no idea about. He also watches Youtube and Brainpop to feed his curiosity about astronomy. He eats, sleeps and talks nothing but astronomy related topics!

Books from Science Centre Resource Centre

Books from our home library

So finally, I sat down and did some research of my own and watched some youtube videos and read up a bit about the stuff Reese was telling me. Time is a constrain for me but never the less, I was totally amazed at my son's understanding on astronomy. Even I needed to read and watch those videos a few times to truly understand the concept of space time and a few other things. Reese is only 6 and I am 36! Pretty advance stuff he is reading and learning. All on his own initiative. 

He drew some pictures explaining the concepts and theories of astrophysics. Totally impressed. Check them out. He drew these from memory and spelled 99% of the words on his own. 

Yesterday morning he said he wanted to teach his friends from science co-op about black holes. He was so serious, he went on to draw the black hole, make labels and also a mobile on black hole. Hehe...

Black hole mobile

Now I am scratching my head, how to convince his friends to let him be 'teacher' for 10 minutes!

Apparently all these are not enough, he told me he wanted to demonstrate the theory how planets or stars can bend space time. So he got a blanket (space time) and asked me to hold it for him.  :) 

Here he explains the theory of black holes.

Now you have an idea what Reese does when he is really obsessed in something. It has been going on for a few weeks now and shows no sign of slowing down! By the way, we haven't done our usual learning like math, history and English for the past 2 weeks but I think he learned enough astronomy to cover a few grades!

 Here are 2 great links if your children are interested in astronomy:

http://science.discovery.com/video-topics/space-videos/space-school.htm

www.brainpop.com (subscription)

Great educational tools:

From National Geographic shop - A globe showing constellation. It beams on to the wall. Quite cool.

Experiment set from Scholastic