Activity: April Fools!

Here are some funny April Fools pranks from Family Fun magazine:

http://familyfun.go.com/

Your kids might also enjoy the famous spaghetti tree hoax, broadcast by the BBC in 1957. It shows an Italian family harvesting spaghetti from trees during the annual spaghetti harvest.

You can see the original broadcast here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/

Web Site: Classical Music for Kids

Classical Music for Kids

http://www.classicsforkids.com/

Lots of fun stuff for classical kids here. There's a monthly radio show that explains some aspect of classical music - this month it's about jokes in music. You can browse through the archived shows too.

The site also has some games and educational tools and lots of music to hear. There's a nice kid-friendly design, but some of the games are hard to figure out without reading the directions.

More Music for Kids and Families on BigLearning.com

News for Kids - Freediver sets records

Freediver sets records

http://www.washingtonpost.com/

How long can your kids hold their breath? Here's an article about Tanya Streeter, a professional freediver, who can hold hear breath for more than six minutes.

Safety First! If you share this with your kids, make sure you read them the important safety caution at the end of the article: never try to hold your breath underwater alone - always dive with a buddy. Even as a professional freediver, Streeter never, ever goes without a buddy.

Education News for Adults: Leonardo's Basement

Leonardo's Basement: Hands-on Learning for Kids

http://www.connectforkids.org/node/4069

How does test-driven schooling affect after-school programs? Some are falling right in line, offering more of the same test prep and drill after school. It's good to know that there are programs like Leonardo's Basement, which offer kids the chance for hands-on, creative activities that build skills kids don't get in school.

I like that many of the activities are developed by kids, and that the directors are aware of the big learning (math, science, etc.) without pushing specific curricular objectives. They talk about the importance of kids learning to direct their own activity in a world where adults tend to fill every moment for them.

Activity: Buggy Pets

Buggy Pets

http://www.amonline.net.au/insects/insects/pets.htm

http://www.bugsincyberspace.com/raising_phasmids.html

As the resident hamster-cage cleaner, I can see the appeal of insect pets. If your young entomologist wants to keep a bug for more than an hour or two, these pages have advice on selection and care of insects. For example, I learned how you provide drinking water, and it's not via a tiny water bottle. Instead, you keep a piece of moist sponge in a jar lid.

The cool science comes from trying to recreate an insect's natural habitat, and from observing the insect's life cycle. The bugsincyberspace page is written by a serious hobbyist, and even has an e-mail address your child could use to correspond with someone who apparently knows his bugs.

Read our review of the Bug Vacuum Toy

Math Moment: Flipping Coins

Flipping coins

http://shazam.econ.ubc.ca/flip/

The more times you flip a coin, the closer you get to the statistical 1:1 ratio of heads to tails. This site lets you say how many coins to flip, and then shows you the results both with pictures and numbers. Try flipping increasing numbers of coins and see if you do indeed approach 50% heads. Try flipping a given number (say, 10) over and over again, and see how much it varies from time to time. Do small numbers vary more than big ones?

More Fun Math for Kids

Web Site: Obscure Holidays

Obscure Holidays

http://www.stayfreemagazine.org/archives/13/holidays_list.html

You don't want to miss International Tuba Day again this year, do you? You and your kids will enjoy this list of odd holidays, many instigated by commercial interests.

Rescue Recess

Education News for Adults

Rescuing Recess

http://www.rescuingrecess.com/

http://www.pta.org/ne_press_release_detail_1142028998890.html

Can ya' believe it? Forty percent of elementary schools have either curtailed recess or canceled it outright to make more time for academics. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot - research shows that, like adults, kids do better with a break. Not to mention the health, emotional, and social benefits of unstructured physical activity outdoors.

The PTA and the Cartoon Network have launched a new initiative to put recess back in the school day. Check out the two sites above to find out how you can help advocate for this important initiative.

Anyone interested in preventing the high-pressure craziness being inflicted on kids in the name of achievement should also check out this book:

What Happened to Recess, and Why Are Our Children Struggling in Kindergarten? by Susan Ohanian (McGraw-Hill, 2002)

Book Review: Castle Diary

Castle Diary: The Journal of Tobias Burgess, Page by Richard Platt, Illustrated by Chris Riddell (Candlewick, 2003)

Ages 7-12

For any knight-and-sword-fascinated kids, this book offers a great kid's-eye view of life castle life. Castle Diary is written from the point of view of Tobias, an eleven-year-old boy learning the duties of a page at Strandborough Castle in the year 1285. There's a wonderful mix of surprising details from everyday life and adventure. Tobias goes on a hunt and helps at a knight's tournament, but also plays with other boys and gets sick from a feast.

Tobias writes with a middle-ages vocabulary and sentence structure, which might make the book challenging for younger kids, even as a read-aloud. But those younger kids will learn lots of vocabulary if you stop to talk about what's happening as you read.

The illustrations are packed with both humor and detail. Kids can get a sense of the story just by looking at them and reading the captions.

 

Support Big Learning! Buy this book - or any other book - by clicking on this link

Activity: Enjoy some poetry

http://www.poetryarchive.org/childrensarchive/home.do

On this site, you and the kids can listen to some great children's poetry read by the poet. The recordings also contain an introduction in which the poet explains the poem.

Beware of some browser issues though. I couldn't get the recordings to play in Firefox, but the site seemed to detect this and showed the text of both the poet's introduction and the poem (but no warning about not being able to play the poem - I had to guess that for myself). With Internet Explorer, the poems played beautifully, but I didn't see the text, and I guess I wanted both.

Math Moment: Great Circle Mapper

http://gc.kls2.com/

Great Circle Mapper (GCM) is a great site to share if your family will be traveling by air. Enter the two airport codes, and GCM will tell you the distance between them. It will also draw you a nice map. Adults can learn a thing or two about how flights are planned by clicking on the various hyper-links - I learned that for twin-engine planes always have to be within 60 minutes of an airport in case an engine fails.

As far as the math goes, your kid will improve their number sense about distances - what kinds of places are around 500 miles away? 1000 miles? Also, the idea of great-circle distances is important in geometry. We tend to think about geometry in terms of figures on a flat plane: the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, lines can be parallel, two lines can meet at only one point. But on the surface of a sphere (like the Earth), all the rules change. See this link for a summary and then show your kids on a globe.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/SphericalGeometry.html

Ballet Steps on Video

Ballet Videos Online

http://www.paballet.org/outreach/steps.aspx

From First Position to


Frappé, this page offers your young ballet enthusiast 24 short videos of basic ballet steps.

ADHD a misnomer?

Attention Surplus? Re-examining a Disorder

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/07/health/07essa.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

By some estimates, 10% of boys are on medication for ADHD, and new risks have been reported for these medications. This article questions whether the problem is indeed a disorder, whether ADHD-diagnosed kids always have trouble paying attention, and the degree to which situations affect symptoms. Read it quick - the New York Times usually only lets you read articles for a week.

Book Review: Super Science Concoctions

Super Science Concoctions by Jill Frankel Hauser (Williamson, 1996)

Ages 6-10

I still remember my first grade teacher asking this vexing riddle: What gets wetter as it dries? Answer: A towel!

In Super Science Concoctions, this riddle begins a series of activities about capillary action - interesting things that happens as water gets absorbed and moves through materials. Typical of the lively presentation of the Williamson Kids Can books, the riddle contributes humor while getting kids thinking about the topic at hand.

Super Science Concoctions is a great book for kids who think that science is about mixing things. They can get out their beakers and test tubes. There's plenty of attention to creating effects with food coloring, adding intrigue with "secret messages" or magic tricks, and other kid-friendly stuff.

Each activity has a short paragraph called "The Principle of the Thing" that explains the scientific principle behind the activity. There's also "Science Speak" boxes that explain terms like capillary and adhesion. Lots of the activities offer extensions (More to Explore). Sometimes the activity ends with a question, then referring kids to another activity elsewhere in the book to find the answer. Kids can have a lot of fun with this book.

Support Big Learning! Buy this book - or any other book - by clicking on this link

Activity: Dig a hole through the Earth

Dig a hole through the Earth

http://www.digholes.com/

Here in the U.S., many of us remember childhood afternoons spent trying to dig a hole all the way through the Earth to China, which we were told was on the other side of the world.

The DigHoles web page lets you point to any place on Earth, and find out where a hole dug from that place would come out. Your kids will understand the activity better if you do it with a globe in hand. Find your city on the globe and on the web page. When DigHole tells you where the hole emerges, help your child find that place on the globe.

You can find geography books on BigLearning.com: http://www.biglearning.com/books-history-for-kids.

 

Math Moment: Create a Graph

Math Moment

Create a Graph

http://nces.ed.gov/nceskids/graphing/

Remind your kids why making graphs is a fun way to understand real-world information better. Try this page from NCES Kids - a quick and simple little tool for making, saving, and printing your own graphs. You can enter your data, choose from among many formatting options, create your labels, and see your graph. If your child is new to graphing, I recommend choosing a personally interesting data set to graph - for example, number of desserts your child had each day for the past five days.

For older graphers comfortable with spreadsheets, here's a page with data sets to download and graph:

http://mathforum.org/workshops/sum96/data.collections/datalibrary/data.set6.html

and

http://mathforum.org/workshops/sum96/data.collections/datalibrary/other.resources.html has other data sources to peruse.

More Fun Math for Kids

Web Site: Weird Inventions

Weird inventions

http://totallyabsurd.com/archive.htm

The young inventors at your house will love this collection of strange inventions that actually received patents - a golf-club cooler, a car wash for humans, and a diaper alarm that goes off when the diaper is wet.

More inventing resources on BigLearning.com

Web Site: Pavement Drawings

Web Site

Pavement drawings

http://users.skynet.be/J.Beever/pave.htm

Haul out the sidewalk chalk - your kids will be inspired by these amazing pavement drawings. They have to be viewed from a certain point, and when they are, they look three-dimensional. Viewed from another side, they look wildly out of proportion. To see what I mean, check out the first two drawings on the fourth row of thumbnails - one is the "Swimming Pool" drawing seen from the correct viewpoint, and the other shows how distorted it its viewed from the wrong side.

If your kids are interested in learning to draw three-dimensional-looking drawings, here's a review of a good instructional book:

Draw 3-D: A step-by-step guide to perspective drawing
http://www.biglearning.com/book-review-draw-3-d.htm

Comment on this article

Education News for Adults: Axing Art and Music

Education News for Adults

It's Testing Time in Florida, and this article documents schools canceling art or music instruction and shifting the money so they can hire another reading teacher. Is this happening in your state?

Read the whole article here: http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/sfl-parts01mar01,0,6471124.story?coll=sfla-news-palm

Should schools trade the arts for more reading and math? What do you think? Comment on this article here

Magazine Review: Moo Cow Fan Club

Moo Cow Fan Club

http://www.moocowfanclub.com

Ages 5-12

"The Children's Magazine Both Funny and Smart." That's the tag line of this wacky little gem of a magazine. It's ad-free, and also refreshingly free of secondary agendas and tie-ins. They're not promoting anybody's cartoon network or video game or trying to sell you a line of action figures or trading cards. It's just a magazine, and it's great fun for kids.

Each issue revolves around a theme - this month is ancient Egypt. Other back issues include baby animals, Hawaii, space, and the Aztecs. You won't believe how good the writing is - snappy, full of fun facts, and respectful of kids intelligence. There's non-stop creativity in the presentation: some articles are written from a child's or animal's perspective, or in advice-column format, or as a how-to (how the Egyptians made papyrus).

Each issue has a craft project - my favorite is the "sock pharaoh" in the ancient Egypt issue. There are also comics featuring the Moo Cow character, puzzles, and other fun stuff.

You can order Moo Cow Fan Club through the Moo Cow web site or through the Amazon link below.

Amazon.com Buying Information

Activity: Make a Flip Book

Activity

Make a flip book

In a flip animation book, each page has one frame of a short animation. When you pull all the pages back with your thumb and let them flip by quickly, you see the whole animation.

Inspired by some professionally-drawn flip animation books, our kids wanted to try making their own. In case your kids would like to try, I scoured the web for tips:

- The basic technique is to draw a simple figure - say a ball - and change it slightly on each page. You might draw the ball slightly lower on each page so when the pages are flipped, the ball appears to fall down. Flip it backwards, the ball appears to fall up!

- In our experience, a small tablet or Post-it pad works best. One site recommended using the page corners in an old phone book - but there really isn't much room there! Some sites recommend cutting out small squares of paper and stapling them to make a book, but we found that it's really hard to line them up perfectly enough to flip well.

- For small kids, try making each page a crayon rubbing instead of a drawing. Take something like a large paper clip, put it under each page and rub a crayon over it until the shape appears. On the next page, spin it slightly and rub again. It will look like the paper clip spins when you flip the book.

- Draw in dark marker starting from the last page and working up to the first. That way, you can see your previous drawing through the page you are working on. You trace the previous drawing, changing it slightly.

You can find more art activities on BigLearning.com's art pages: http://www.biglearning.com/treasureart.htm .

Math Moment: Crazy 4 Math contest

Math Moment

Crazy 4 Math Contest

http://crazy4math.googolpower.com/

I like this site - they seem to be kindred Big Learning spirits. They're running a contest for kids. Kids send in ideas for learning or using math in everyday life. The kids can win prizes (though the prizes seem to be all company products), but the best ideas will also be published on the site and in their column. So if your kids use math to help them in sports, arts, or some other real-world activity, encourage them to send in their ideas!

Know of other online math contests? Comment on this article

More Fun Math for Kids