Personal Globe

We're home-schooling Mikey this year, which has led to some interesting situations, and some fun projects. This weekend Mikey had some science projects assigned which required turning off the lights and shining a flashlight on a globe... to help him learn about how time is different in different parts of the world.

Our globe... Mikey took the continents
off right after we finished our experiment,
but I notice that he missed Australia!

Well, I have a globe somewhere, but for the life of me I couldn't find it, and there's a nice globe at our library but we couldn't very well ask them to turn off the lights for us so we could do a science experiment (!), so instead of buying a globe and having to figure out where in our tiny house to put it, we decided to do things the fun way. A few days ago Mikey pulled out a big red jumper-ball thingy with Spider-Man on it, and we decided to MAKE a globe for the experiment! Saturday Mikey and I had a Cub Scout trip to the Tulsa Historical Society, and on the way home we stopped at the library and picked up a good atlas. The idea was to trace pictures of the continents and stick them to the ball to build our globe. Well, for several reasons that turned out to be harder than I had thought. The original idea was to trace the continents out of the book, but we couldn't see through our paper, so I drew them out freehand, using the book as a guide (Mikey drew them too along with me, but ultimately we used mine.) Then as anyone who has studied globes and maps knows, because of the distortion of making a flat map of something on a round Earth, maps become more approximate as they cover larger areas, and pasting a flat map to a sphere is a sketchy proposition. Both of these problems were especially bad on Asia, which covers a good hunk of the real globe... Europe got kind of slighted on our globe because I was sketching from a map of Asia and Europe was kind of an afterthought on the left-hand side (I'm pretty sure I left thousands of people from the western coast of Spain homeless.) But we got it made, did our experiment, learned what we were supposed to learn about time, and we learned some cool facts about geography in the process! After Mikey was done with his write-ups of the experiment, I showed him the World Time Server Web site, which you can use to find out instantly what time it is anywhere in the world... pretty cool!

We had two other interesting experiences while we were at the library. We were looking at the globe and talking about various parts of the world, and an old guy came over and told us he was a WWII veteran and showed us the places in the Pacific Ocean where he was stationed back then in the Navy. Then we saw our children's librarian friend Marianne, and Mikey showed her the book they gave him at the Tulsa Historical Society, and she showed us something about the book that we didn't know... her daughter had drawn a picture of a covered wagon back when the daughter was Mikey's age, and it had been printed in the book! Ms. Marianne laughed about it, because her daughter is getting ready to graduate from college now... but it was cool to see that in the book Mikey had just gotten!