OK, Daddy, guess what? Here’s my idea. We get a stick of wood and we put a timer on it, then we get a big rock and put it on the end. We have to put feet on the big rock, so it can stand on the stick.
Then when the rain comes down, down, down, we push really hard on the stick. We have to do a really big push, then the rock will go up in the air and come down, and the mountain will grow. Then we measure how much weight it took, and how much damage it did when it hit the ground. With the timer. Which isn’t a timer, it’s a scale.
That’s what we’re going to do tomorrow!
(It’s not perfectly verbatim, but that’s pretty close to what she said when she came over with this drawing. At four-and-a-half, she’s well on her way to being a mad scientist…)
What always surprises me, with all of those apparent gaps of logic, is that if you ask questions, somehow the gaps get filled in 🙂 Mad scientist indeed!
It sounds vaguely like a certain experiment that a very smart lady undertook in the late 1700s trying to measure the impact of a dropped body by measuring the indentation on clay. The question up for exploration was the nature of gravity and whether it increased linearly or exponentially as the height of the dropped body was increased.
I suspect that although Steelykid lacks the scientific framework and language the basics of an experimental exploration are certainly present.
Has SteelyKid been learning geography? I see the word “Oslo” written on that stick. Maybe she’s already dreaming of a Nobel Prize (the Peace Prize is awarded in Oslo; the others are awarded in Stockholm, which is probably harder for a preschooler to spell).
Prof. Freud would have seen a phalus in that drawing …
I see she understands the importance of experiments.