On Tuesday, Vera taught the 4-6 graders. She will be switching in more often in the next months. She's also a physicist and astronomer, and we talk constantly about teaching physics and astronomy, so we're pretty much interchangeable in terms of the experience we provide the children. We both use active learning techniques even in our college classrooms, so with these children we certainly do as much hands-on learning as possible.
Vera started by showing that white light is made of a spectrum of colors, just as I did with the Primaria class last Friday. When we separate the colors, we see a spectrum from violet to red just like in a rainbow, but there are additional "colors" (wavelengths of light) we can't see: ultraviolet (coming before violet in the spectrum) and infrared (coming after red). We have to be aware of ultraviolet because that's what gives us sunburn, but the focus Tuesday was on infrared. Last Friday, I left an infrared videocamera at the school for the children to explore with. It gives a whole new way of seeing things: it basically sees how hot things are, so for example the sky is dark (cold) and people are fairly bright (warm). Infrared light also interacts with matter differently than does visible light. For example, with the infrared camera you may not be able to see through a window which is transparent to visible light, but you may be able to see through a black plastic garbage bag. You may want to watch this short video of all these effects with your child.
I'll be doing infrared with Primaria next week, so I may post more details then. This post is brief because the video linked to above is better than anything I could write here. I definitely encourage you to watch it with your child and discuss what he/she saw and did when he/she had the camera in his/her own hands! In addition to the scientific aspects, there is some value in realizing that the whole world can be looked at in a way so completely different from the way we normally do.
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