Tuesday 21st April 2020
This morning, continuing with the Jack and the Beanstalk theme, we had some PE and some Science (Hooray!). So after breakfast we did the exercise – pretending to be different types of beans. jef had the activity page and shouted out the instructions, while warp-girl and I acted them out. ‘Jumping Bean!’ …we’re jumping around the room, ‘Runner Bean!’ …we’re running around the room, ‘French Bean!’ …we’re striking a pose and shouting Bonjour!, ‘Butter Bean!’ …we’re sliding around the floor on our behinds. You get the idea… warp-boy joined in too but his beans, unsurprisingly, seemed to be dinosaur beans; stomping around and roaring at us all. Next came the science, and more specifically, Biology (I’ve got this covered!). The Life Cycle of a Bean. We watched some videos on YouTube and talked about what was happening. ‘Roots, Shoots, Seedling, Plant’, ‘The seeds are moved by animals, people or wind’, ‘Germination!’. I think I enjoyed this task just as much (if not more) that warp-girl and she created a really good diagram of the process (maybe she’ll be the next Barbara McClintock…). After all the beany excitement I left warp-girl playing some online reading games and cracked on with my own work. Today was marking, more emails and a bit of planning.
At 20:55, jef announced that it was time to go outside! He had actually forewarned us of this earlier in the day which was why warp-girl was still up. A trail of around 30 Starlink satellites was going to be zooming overhead…the sky was quite dark and clear…perfect satellite spotting conditions! We didn’t have to wait long before they appeared; tiny, but really clear against the night sky. They followed, one after the other, on their orbital adventure. warp-girl was very excited by this and I really hoped the neighbours didn’t mind her shouting ‘Hi Space Rangers!’, repeatedly into the ether. I later read that the satellites are made by SpaceX to provide satellite Internet access. They are planning a fleet of thousands of Starlink satellites, although they only have 417 operational ones at the moment (according to Wikipedia). jef had found out about them on James Darpinian’s website. He has a very interesting page which (providing you allow access to your location) tells you which satellites will pass over your home, at what time and from which direction. To infinity, and beyond! Actually, it was to bed for warp-girl and to the living room for a game of Super Monkey Bowling for us.