Future Scientist

My Girl 6 turned into Girl 7 yesterday, and she asked for one thing: a “box with gloves.” A wha?
Y’know… a box with gloves. Just what every girl wants.

I’m thinking she’s got some future scientist geek chic thing going on up in here. So I did what any good mom would do – I gave her a messy, experiment-filled science birthday party and sciencey presents.

And in case you have a little ball of curiosity on your hands, here’s what I gave her to feed that:

From the “The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That” series:

Clam-I-Am: All About the Beach (ISBN: 978 0 375 82280 3)
Oh Say Can You Seed?: All About Flowering Plants (ISBN: 978 0 375 81095 4)
On Beyond Bugs: All About Insects (ISBN: 978 0 679 87303 7)
Inside Your Outside: All About the Human Body (ISBN: 978 0 375 81100 5)
Oh Say Can You Say, What’s the Weather Today?: All About Weather(ISBN:9780375 822766)
I Can Name 50 Trees Today!: All About Trees (ISBN: 978 0 375 82277 3)
One Cent, Two Cent, Old Cent, New Cent: All About Money (ISBN: 978 0 375 82881 2)
A Whale of a Tail!: All About Porpoises, Dolphins, and Whales (ISBN: 978 0 375 82279 7)
Random House
Audience:grades 1-6

These books (and there are others in the series, too) are non-fiction – that is to say, they are factual books of information about a pretty good range of topics, mostly science-related. The difference here is that while many non-fiction books, even for kids, can be pretty dry reading, these are set in Seussian rhyme and metre, making them great fun to read aloud, even as they are packed with information.

They may not be the stuff of school project reference material – there is, for example, no index, table of contents, or logical layout of the material presented – but they are wonderful reading for a child who is just interested and whose brain wants feeding. they  are the sort of thing you could imagine your child reading for fun as much as for learning, and that sort of melding of purposes makes these a great idea for a bright, inquisitive child.

From the “Magic School Bus” series of DVDs:

The Magic School Bus Catches a Wave
Creepy Crawly Fun
Super Sports Fun
Bugs! Bugs! Bugs!
The Human Body
Warner / Scholastic
Audience: grades k-4

I don’t recommend DVDs often, but these are not only really well done, they are also largely lifted directly from the original series of books, too. Just as those books have been a huge hit with kids, so it goes with the video format which animates them.

What I love about these is that while being funny and raucous and filled with adventure, they are also filled with information and interesting facts. Each story – and the DVDs each contain 3 – takes the class on the weirdest field trip you’ve ever heard of, when the school bus becomes tiny or morphs into a different form altogether to take them places that no other group of kids could ever hope to go. These range from inside their classmate’s blood stream to tide pools, bee hives, and outer space. Aside from the corny jokes, these are actually such a fun learning experience that I quite enjoy them myself, too – not something I can say about a whole lot of DVD fare for kids, to be honest.

There are a few more in the series, but I couldn’t find links for them all. You can buy them individually, or you can, as I did, buy the set of 8 at once for $40 on a semi-regular basis in Scholastic flyers.