From the category archives:

Area

Natural and Built

May 16, 2012 Activities

I‘ve always been a bit meh about natural and built landscapes. I mean it’s so obvious – do we seriously need to point this one out? But then a whole series of little things happened at once, as they do, and I realised that maybe it does need to be discussed. Not taught as such, [...]

Wordless Wednesday – Baby Tomatoes

May 16, 2012 Life and Living

It has come to my attention that some people think I can grow plants. In reality, I have a black thumb. I can germinate them, but then they always die, or go mouldy, or are blown away in a cyclone (seriously!) or are otherwise stunted and sickly. So here I am very proudly showing off [...]

Quiz – The Mountain Edition

May 15, 2012 Earth and Beyond

I live in one of the flattest areas of the flattest continent, so mountains are mainly pretty pictures to me. What is the tallest mountain on earth? What formed the Great Dividing range? How did transhumance allow the Alps to be exploited? How do pyramidal peaks or horns form? What is shown in the satellite [...]

Modern Moon Myths

May 14, 2012 Earth and Beyond

These pop up all the time, the moon has been just a little bit important in human history and we’ve had lots of time to tell myths about it. It would be nice to think that as a group we’ve grown out of werewolves and love spells, except we’re still doing it. There are new moon [...]

A Set of Science Songs

May 11, 2012 Earth and Beyond

We had another couple of days without internet which is why there was no quiz posted on Tuesday. Even the trusty 3G failed so no mobile devices either. It gave me an excuse for a trawl on YouTube to find some fun and interesting videos to share instead. An easy way to finish the week. [...]

Building Bridges

May 10, 2012 Activities

It’s one of the classics – give children a pile of objects, such as newspaper, straws or pipecleaners, and tell them that they have to make a bridge across a gap that will carry a certain weight. I’m not suggesting you try that with little kids, but we did have a fun time trying to [...]

Wordless Wednesday – Supermoon?

May 9, 2012 Earth and Beyond

We were outside on Sunday night so I grabbed the camera and got some shots of the spectacular moon rising. I didn’t grab the tripod, so sorry for the fuzziness. This is an actual photo, not a white dot on a cheap graphics program. I need to learn about using the camera on manual if [...]

Write it Down

May 7, 2012 General science

I didn’t start on purpose, but this is turning into a little series on how some of the things we use the most have developed and changed. So far I’ve looked at cheese and milk bottle packaging. I enjoy history and archaeology, and I think the way we use materials and the effects of social changes [...]

Amphibian Answers

May 4, 2012 Life and Living

1. Amphibians are the only group of animals with legs like us (bones, organs etc – the tetrapods) that are not adapted to have young on dry land. Although this breaks down a little because there are some who have live young, such as stomach-brooding frogs or some caecilians. It’s nice and simple for [...]

Palmar, Power, Precision, and Prints – Hands and fingers for all ages

May 3, 2012 Activities

Hands are one of the things that have made humans so successful, you could call them fundamental to what we are. But they aren’t unique or specialised. In fact it’s pretty much the opposite – every primate and lots of other little brown animals have hands. Horses’ hooves are specialised. We have been successful by [...]