What makes lightning?
That was what Freddy asked as we were eating dinner. The conversation then ranged through the following topics - goodness knows if the links between these will be visible to anyone who wasn’t there at the time, but anyway:
Electrical charges in clouds
Columns of warm air rising within clouds
What makes warm air rise
How that produces wind
What makes the air warm
Why the sun is hot
How long the sun will last
(”That’s the same as it said in Doctor Who!”)
Where science-fiction writers get their ideas
Ideas from old science fiction which exist today
Ideas from today’s science fiction which might exist in the future
Time-travel - Barney said it will never happen because of the paradoxes
How do we know something will “never happen”
What people who lived a century or two ago would have thought many of the things we take for granted today
Which things we could see would have existed a century ago
Which things would have existed but we probably wouldn’t have owned
Computers, phones, plastics, books, pencils…
Responses to the first motorised vehicles on the road
What children played with a century ago
How children spent their time a century ago
Childhood in Victorian times
Childhood in Tudor times
Childhood in poor countries today
Considering that was just the dinner-table conversation, is it any wonder I’m exhausted? 
In: conversations, education, family
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Mealtime conversations are one of the best bits of home ed, I think. I miss those days…. we still sometime have interesting conversations, but with only one ‘child’ at home (and he’s not far off 19) it’s not the same. Sigh.
Mind you, we had some guests once who found our mealtimes very stressful with conversations sparking off other topics, dictionaries and atlases being grabbed to check things, and never really reaching any conclusions!