Today we are sharing the final book in the Ordinary People Change the World Series. We saved I Am Albert Einstein for last. Hazel absolutely loves this series and we have had a lot of fun sharing all eight books. At the end of this post there is a chance to win the entire series from Penguin Kids! We have shared I Am Abraham Lincoln, I Am Lucille Ball, I Am Martin Luther King, Jr., I Am Helen Keller, I Am Rosa Parks, I Am Amelia Earhart, and I Am Jackie Robinson.Brad Meltzer and Christopher Eliopoulos do an amazing job of making these eight people interesting and fun to children and show that each of us can change the world.
I Am Albert Einstein takes the reader from his birth--he had a very large head at birth--to his amazing discoveries. I think he is probably one of the best known scientists/mathematicians of our time. As a boy he did everything in his own time. He did not speak until he was three. He did not like playing like the other kids. He was fascinated with his toy boat and thinking. At a young age his father gave him a compass when Albert had been home sick and for the first time he began to make connections with how the mysteries of the universe. He saw structure in things and this helped him with many of his successes. He was also very curious. However his teachers often thought he was daydreaming. In sixth grade a medical student who visited them on Thursdays for dinner brought him a geometry book. He loved geometry. By fifteen he was doing calculus. However he flunked his college physics class. Yet he later made one of the biggest discoveries in physics--the theory of relativity.
As with all of the books in the series we made a puppet. We had to make the crazy hair. The joke in the book was how awesome his hair is. Hazel wanted all the puppets to hold hands. She was inspired by Martin Luther King, Jr.'s I Have a Dream Speech.
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| By Liugaila (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0], via Wikimedia Commons |
Albert Einstein realized the speed of light is always the same. It is 299,792,458 meters per second or 186,000 miles per second. (Source) The speed of light is symbolized with the letter c. This is chosen because of the Latin word celeritas which means speed though some say it also could be from the word constant. (Source) What the equation is saying is that the amount of energy in an object is equal to the mass of the object times the speed of light squared. The clearest explanation of this that I found on line is at NOVA. E=mc^2 Explained has a pretty good explanation of the basics and an example of using it. Live Science also has a pretty good explanation of the results of Einstein's theory as well as real life places you can see it including GPS and the color of gold. And if that is not exciting enough, Einstein's theory has made the news lately. Gravitational waves that Einstein predicted have finally been detected. (Source) There are many worksheets and examples on-line. I did not find a good one to link to that was not just a download. However a Google search will give you plenty of choices. This ends our math lesson and our tour of this amazing series! I hope you will enter to win the series!!
Penguin Kids' Giveaway
Win all eight book in the series!! Runs February 1-29 and is open to US Residents only!
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