PE 🏃♀️
Since the weather hasn’t been great, I worked on my core instead of soccer:
Math ➕➖✖➗
Multiplying by 4
Multiplying by 4 is like counting by 4: 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, 32, 36, 40. Now the number you multiply 4 by is which number in order you need to pick. So:
4 = 4 x 1
8 = 4 x 2 = 4 + 4
12 = 4 x 3 = 8 + 4
16 = 4 x 4 = 12 + 4
20 = 4 x 5 = 16 + 4
24 = 4 x 6 = 20 + 4
28 = 4 x 7 = 24 + 4
32 = 4 x 8 = 28 + 4
36 = 4 x 9 = 32 + 4
40 = 4 x 10 = 36 + 4
Now for going the other way: adding each number to itself 4 times:
4 x 1 = 4
4 x 2 = 8
4 x 3 = 12
4 x 4 = 16
4 x 5 = 20
4 x 6 = 24
4 x 7 = 28
4 x 8 = 32
4 x 9 = 36
4 x 10 = 40
And here is the multiplication table for 4:
Science 🔬
Mercury
Mercury is the smallest planet in the Solar System – it would take almost 20 Mercurys to make one Earth. It is the closest one to the Sun – only about 36 million miles away. It takes Mercury only 88 days to go all the way around the Sun once, which means Mercury’s year is 88 Earth days long. It spins slowly and one day there is 59 Earth days long. This means that the dark side has a long time to get cold and the one facing the Sun gets really hot. It can get as cold as -300F and as hot as +800F.
The surface of Mercury is made of hard rocks with a lot of craters caused by asteroids crashing into the planet. It looks a lot like Earth’s moon. Like the Moon and unlike Earth, Mercury doesn’t have an atmosphere – that’s gasses like air that surround the planet.
Mercury was named after Roman god of travelers and their messenger, Mercury. It is the same god that the Greeks called Hermes (look in our today’s social science lesson for more on Hermes).
Social Science 👩🎓
Ancient Greece – religion
The Greeks had a large number of gods, like the Egyptians. They created stories called myths, which explained how the world worked. The gods were complicated characters and had a lot of bad qualities. They fought with each other a lot and messed with humans for their own entertainment. The most important gods were called the Olympians (because they live together on Mount Olympus):
- Zeus – god of sky and lightning. He was the leader of the gods
- Hera – goddess of marriage and family. She was Zeus’s wife and the queen of the gods
- Poseidon – god of ocean, earthquakes and horses (I love horses!). He was Zeus’s and Hades’s brother
- Dionysus – god of wine and celebrations
- Apollo – god of archery (that’s shooting with bow and arrow), art, light, prophecy (that’s telling the future) and healing
- Artemis – twin sister of Apollo, goddess of the hunt, archery and animals
- Hermes – god of commerce (that’s buying and selling), travelers and thieves. He was also the messenger of the gods
- Athena – goddess of wisdom, defense and war (battle strategy)
- Ares – god of war (more on the actual fighting)
- Aphrodite – goddess of love and beauty
- Hephaestus – god of blacksmiths, craftsmen and fire
- Demeter – goddess of seasons and agriculture (that’s growing food).
There is one more key god in Greek mythology that is extremely powerful, but he doesn’t live on Mount Olympus with the others. His name is Hades and he is the god of death and underworld. The reason he doesn’t live with the Olympians is because he needs to be in the underworld.
Next to many other gods, there are also heroes (sometimes called demi-gods). Those are children of a god and a regular human. The most important heroes were:
- Hercules – son of Zeus, known for being extremely strong. He fought a lot of monsters in his life. According to mythology, when he died he was made a god.
- Achilles – when he was a baby, his mom put him in River Styx (it was river flowing through the underworld and bathing in it would make you immortal – meaning you couldn’t be killed). She held him by his ankle, which was the only part of his body that could get hurt. Achilles was a hero in Trojan war and he was killed when he got shot with an arrow in his ankle.
- Orpheus – son of Apollo and an extremely talented musician. The myth said that when his wife, Eurydice died, he went into the underworld to rescue her and used his music to convince Hades to let Eurydice return to life.
And let’s not forget about monsters and other creatures we hear about in stories, usually not realizing they were first imagined by the Greeks:
- Centaurs – they had heads and upper bodies of humans attached to a body of a horse
- Cyclopes – one-eyed giants
- Gorgon – they had snakes instead of hair. Medusa was a gorgon – that’s the lady who would turn people into stone when you looked in her eyes
- Griffin – they had a body of a lion, wings and a head of an eagle
- Hydra – serpent with multiple heads. If you cut one off, three new ones would grow in its place
- Cerberus – three-headed dog who guarded the underworld
- Phoenix – fire bird who would die by burning itself and then be reborn from its own ashes
- Sirens – unlike what most of us think, they originally had bodies of birds. They sang beautifully and sailors wouldn’t be able to resist approaching sirens’ island, which always ended in sailors’ death
- Pegasus – a horse with wings.
Trivia ❓
Ancient Greeks used to lay on their sides when they ate dinner.
Word of the day ❗
Anguish – extreme distress of body or mind.
Activity of the day 📺
Watch me talk about Mercury: