It's a Big Big World

I am home for the holidays, and am watching TV at different hours than usual. Lucky for me, I caught an episode of "It's a Big Big World" on PBS. This show features adorable puppet animals that live in and around a tree and get kids to think about science and the world around them. From the PBS website:

"As they accompany Snook and his pals on adventures and investigations in the World Tree, kids will experience science, not as just a collection of facts, but as an exciting process of discovery. Viewers will see characters who are excited about science, who look for answers to the scientific puzzles they encounter, and who follow the steps and methods of scientific investigation. Through the stories of individual characters, kids will learn about different animals - how they live, grow, and change. The series will also introduce children to geography, providing them with a basic understanding that the world is bigger than their immediate surroundings and a sense that they are an important part of a larger community."

The episode I watched had a variety of science topics - they talked about sap (and how if kids had eaten syrup on pancakes they had eaten tree sap) and how the various animals ate in different ways. One of the characters is an old turtle, and they mentioned that turtles have been around for a really long time, before even dinosaurs.

I was impressed. Good job PBS, I'll watch again.

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Humans and Dinosaurs

Hope all of you in the blogosphere had a happy Thanksgiving!

A tradition of mine is to go shopping the day after Thanksgiving as a spectator sport - Americans are crazy and are willing to stand in hour long lines just to save $10.

So, while ogling the very long line for the checkout at Kohls (which wrapped all around the store) I saw a bunch of parents buying these dinosaurs, which turned out to be Imaginext toys from Fisher-Price and feature cavemen-looking men that ride on dinosaurs.

At first, I must admit that I was upset that kids might get the wrong impression that humans and dinosaurs ever lived at the same time. However, with a name like Imaginext I can see why the scenario of humans and dinosaurs living together might be a fun thing for kids to imagine. After all, re-runs of The Flinstones kept me entertained when I was young.

It turns out, however, that creationists think that this idea isn't just good fun, but rather that the Bible tells them humans and dinosaurs lived together. If you google "humans and dinosaurs" the first several hits are all from creationist websites. Instead of linking to any of these sites, I'll direct you to this blog entry instead that extracted some real gems on the topics of the Bible and dinosaurs. The fact that the old testament mentions dragons and that some people think this is the end all source of information just cracks me up.

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Children's books on evolution

I was talking with Sasha last night, and he remembered when he was in 3rd grade and getting a book about atoms and the big bang and how he was telling everyone about what he had learned. I agree, kids are definitely scientists, but most eventually get this curiosity "beaten" out of them. That lead us to think about books about evolution for kids - why not teach them early when they are more receptive to new ideas?

So we came up with a story about natural selection based on the work of Peter and Rosemary Grant that would go something like this:

Freddy the finch was born with a really large beak. Sure his parents had fairly large beaks, but that didn't stop his fellow small juvenile finches from making fun of him. Freddy figured out though that he could eat seeds that were larger than his friends. One day a drought started, and smaller seeds became more and more scarce as it continued not to rain. Freddy could still find large seeds to eat, but most of his friends were not so lucky and eventually died. One day when foraging for seeds, Freddy spotted a female finch with a large beak too! Her name was Frederica, and by next year both Freddy and Frederica had a a few large beaked baby finches of their own. And there was no one there to make fun of them.
(finch picture taken from here)


Looking around though, it does seem that there are a few books on evolution for kids, you can see them here on Amazon.
Life on Earth: The story of evolution looks promising and the illustrations look great too. I should check to see if books like this are available at large book stores.

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Entomological origins of Pokémon

I just read a pretty interesting blog entry about Pokémon, which turns out is a series first started by an amateur entomologist. I can't say I ever paid much attention to the Pokémon themselves while my sister used to watch the cartoon, but it turns out that some Pokémon undergo metamorphosis in biologically real ways. I'll post some pictures below, taken from the Pokémon website.


For those who didn't read the blog entry I linked to, the cicada nymph-like Pokémon (Nincada) later emerges as an adult cicada (Ninjask) and its molted skin (Shedinja).

Who knew that Pokémon could also be (somewhat) educational?

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