North South

Today, Adam brought some magnets and I tried to use them to stick butterflies to my dress.  I used a very little, very strong magnet and put in on the inside of my dress, then I put the butterfly magnet on the outside.  But sometimes the magnet pushed the butterfly away.

This is because magnets have a north pole and a south pole.  The north pole wants to be friends with the south pole.  The south pole wants to be friends with the north pole.  But two north poles or two south poles don't want to be friends and push each other away.  Because you don't want to be friends with yourself.

Then we talked about the Earth's north and south poles.  If you take a magnet, its north pole wants to point towards Earth's North Pole!  That means that the North Pole is actually the south pole of Earth-magnet.

Earth doesn't just have one north pole.  It has a Geographic North Pole at very top of earth (the point the earth rotates around).  And it also has a North Magnetic Pole, which is where magnets point towards.  They are close together, but not in the same place.

The North Magnetic Pole isn't always in the same place.  Every 100,000 to 1 million years, the Earth-magnet switches its north and south.  The North Magnetic Pole also moves around a bit every year.

We wanted to figure out what north pole Santa lives at.  If he lived at North Magnetic Pole, he would need to move his entire house and workshop and reindeer and sleigh and workers to another place all the time.  So if you were Santa, how hard do you think it would me to move your entire life?