Wednesday, 6th June.

Yesterday we watched the transit of Venus.  We watched it online, due to the fact that we live in Oregon and it was cloudy.  It was also far more convenient as we could leave it up on the screen and come back to it whenever we wanted.

After a while I started talking about the Planet Suite by Holst, and that Venus is known as the goddess of love.  I googled the music and found the London Philharmonic playing it.  The boys didn't like that particularly, and we went onto Mars, the bringer of war.  They loved that! It's dramatic music, with, not surprisingly, a marching beat.  Benjamin started creeping around as the music suggested "sneaking" then jumped up on me when a large crashing sound was heard.  The music of Mars spoke to them in a way Venus didn't.  We tried a few others (I was trying to find the music for "I vow to thee my country"), but nothing else captured them. 
Meanwhile, Venus was making its slow progress across the sun.....I explained what was happening, but couldn't remember where Venus was in the order of the planets, so we looked that up, having worked out it must of course be nearer the sun than us.
As we were listening to the Mars music on youtube, they started showing pictures of the Mars Rover and the pictures that it sent back.  We looked up details of that mission, and the fact that it had to be unmanned for many reasons.  That led to discussions of the first trips to space, Sputnik, the Russian dog, the space race, cold war, politics. 

Not bad for watching the Transit of Venus with no agenda.