Inertia

Turning the television on at our house during the day is a pretty rare thing.  We are just too occupied doing other fun things to bother with it.  Occasionally, Mini Me will want to watch a show on PBS.  I wonder if he thinks that is the only channel that exists because that is the only channel we turn on for him.  His favorites are Sesame Street and Super Why and I love that they are educational.
 
Another show he watches is Sid the Science Kid.  I think this is a phenomenal program: it has fun songs, fun characters, and a lot of wonderful science topics.  One day Mini Me was watching a Sid show about inertia, which is the tendency of something to maintain motion (or stillness) until acted on by an external force.  In the show we saw Sid put a stuffed animal on a skateboard and when the skateboard bumped into something, it stopped, but the animal went flying.  


I quickly realized we could easily practice the concept of inertia on our own.  When we said goodbye to Sid and turned off the TV, we got out various trucks and put a little man on top, then rammed the trucks into a stack of dictionaries (it made me feel good to make our old-fashioned dictionaries useful since I don't use them to actually look up words any more).  The ramming and seeing the little man fly off was great fun; even Little Lady started laughing.  It was more or less a fun little game with the fancy word "inertia" attached.  We still occasionally ram trucks into things and talk about inertia.   Thank you, Sid!