News & Blog

About the Book: You know it’s going to be a rough summer when you spend Father’s Day visiting your dad in the local lockup. Noah’s dad is sure that the owner of the Coral Queen casino boat is flushing raw sewage into the harbor–which has made taking a dip at the local beach like swimming in a toilet. […]

In this week’s book, Oliver Olson makes a solar system model for his school project. So let’s make one too! Here’s how to make a scale model of the solar system using stuff you probably have left over from Halloween.      Materials needed:      2 small pumpkins     2 mini pumpkins     3 Tootsie Pops, sticks cut off  […]

About the Book: Oliver Olson’s teacher is always saying that one person with a big idea can change the world. But how is Oliver supposed to change the world when his parents won’t let him do anything on his own – not his class projects or even attending activities such as the space sleepover at school. […]

I’m breaking from the normal schedule of science posts following book reviews. One reason is that M.E. Castle (the author of Popular Clone) already has lots of great experiments that you can find here. So I’ve called in another guest poster, the lovely and smart Tasha Seegmiller. You can find her blog here and follow her on Twitter here. I […]

About the Book: Meet Fisher Bas: 12 years-old, growth-stunted, a geeky science genius, and son of the Nobel Prize-winning creators of the Bas-Hermaphrodite-Sea-Slug-Hypothesis. No surprise: Fisher isn’t exactly the most popular kid in his middle-school, tormented daily by the beefy, overgrown goons he calls The Vikings. But he senses relief when he comes upon the idea […]

For Groovy Robinson in The Year the Swallows Came Early, the best time for birdwatching was in March. But in many parts of the world, winter is a great time for birding!  If you want to be an amateur ornithologist (even for a day), you’ll probably want a bird feeder, a pencil and notebook, and a […]

About the Book: Eleanor “Groovy” Robinson loves cooking and plans to go to culinary school just as soon as she’s old enough. But even Groovy’s thoughtfully-planned menus won’t fix the things that start to go wrong the year she turns eleven–suddenly, her father is in jail, her best friend’s long-absent mother reappears, and the swallows that […]

I thought I’d mix it up a little by reviewing a great science album for kids, Here Comes Science by They Might Be Giants. If you’re like me, you remember They Might Be Giants from the days when they were recording songs like Istanbul for adults. Now they have several albums for kids that are fun, educational, and often […]

In this week’s book, The Reinvention of Edison Thomas, one of the ways Eddy calms himself down is by reciting the elements from the periodic table. Some of the words he recites like chlorine and iron) are probably familiar, while others (scandium!) are…not so familiar. All matter (everything that takes up space and has mass) is made up […]

About the Book: Eddy Thomas can read a college physics book, but he can’t read the emotions on the faces of his classmates at Drayton Middle School. He can spend hours tinkering with an invention, but he can’t stand more than a few minutes in a noisy crowd, like the crowd at the science fair, which […]