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The CHRISTMAS LECTURES® are entertaining and informative science events for young people, broadcast on UK television every year. You can watch them online here. Prepare to be amazed
UPDATE
The Royal Institution have just launched Experimental, a series of YouTube videos with great and simple experiments for parents and children to try at home. Find their YouTube Channel here.
Real science, online – The Zooniverse is home to the internet’s largest, most popular and most successful citizen science projects. You can choose to help researchers characterize bat calls, or explore Mars, without leaving your house.
Six awesome courses in one awesome channel: John Green teaches you US History and Hank Green teaches you Chemistry. Check out the playlists for past courses in World History, Biology, Literature, and Ecology
Bill Nye is a scientist, engineer, comedian, author and inventor. His mission is to make science fun, and help people understand the science that makes our world work. Here are the Home Demos, the experiments you should try at home sometime. Keep clicking around and you’ll find the Episode Guides.
Edheads is an online educational resource that provides free science and math games and activities that promote critical thinking. You can design a mobile (cell) phone, repair a weakened aorta or learn about simple machines, and much more.
This is a site that links to lots of other sites – we loved the Amusement Park Physics – design your own roller-coaster but be careful because if you get the science wrong… DISASTER!
Silvia is a young girl from California, USA and she’s been making Super-Awesome webshows on making cool stuff since 2010. She demonstrates science experiments, and great craft projects. You’ll never be bored, when Silvia is around!
The kids pages on Nasa are awesome, and that is before we get to the videos of ELMO at NASA. Science and Sesame Street. It doesn’t get much better than this.
Veritasium is a science video blog featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science – these are at times more advanced, but well worth a look.
We love the short and snappy servings of science from the SciShow team.
We just had to include this one, as the solar system explanation is so brilliant even our science dunce editor understood it!
Engineering is Elementary is a project of the National Center for Technological Literacy at the Museum of Science, Boston (MOS). They have fantastic resources for teachers and home-ed families, on a range of topics. Some of the content is free to use, and the teaching guides and stories can be purchased on the site.
The National Science Teachers Association has a great list of books about science
National Geographic is a great website with a huge range of articles and fun stuff
Cool music and science from They May Be Giants and the Here Comes Science CD
Woodlands Resources Science for educational and fun activities
How Stuff Works – well, just that really
This is a bit of a niche Science subject, but really cool – Skateboarding Science
If you like computers and want to learn how to make your own programmes, BBC had this cool game toolkit so that you can make your own games and Code.org can teach you to code, as can Scratch
If your parents are on Twitter, get them to follow @realscientists – a rotational twitter account featuring real scientists, science writers, communicators and policy makers talking about their lives and their work. Tweeters from different fields of science and science-related fields.
How To Grow Your Own Geek is a podcast created to share a love of geeking and parenting, and to provide advice on how to combine the two. Check out their Science and History Podcasts for Kids
Coding Resources by DeVry Bootcamp has plenty of interesting resources for older or more advanced students.
Today is election day in UK, when the citizens of the country choose their new government. You can read all about how the elections work here. You wouldn’t think that dress codes of ancient Rome would affect the elections of today, but they do! Millie Slavidou explains.
Today is a good day to think about the word ‘candidate’. I rather like the etymology of this one.
It comes from Latin candidus, which is the past participle* of candidare, which meant ‘to make white, to make bright’.
Not because of whitewashing whatever the candidates might have said or done! It was because in ancient Rome candidates who wanted to be elected either to the Senate or any other office wore white robes.
If we take it one step further back, to a root meaning ‘white, shining’, we find that ‘candle’ is a cognate.**
The past particle is the past form of the verb that can also be used as an adjective, like “a fallen tree”. In the case above, the adjective is like saying ‘whitened’ in English. Other examples of past particles are:
verb: bite
past particle: bitten
example: a bitten apple
verb: choose
past particle: chosen
example: aa chosen present
verb: crash
past particle: crashed
example: a crashed bicycle
A cognate is a distant relative, a word ultimately from the same root. Like a third cousin. Here are some examples of cognates.
Book is related to beech. Well, actually, book means beech! Both come from Germanic word meaning beech tree, Buche.
Germanic runes were originally inscribed on tablets made of beech wood. Modern German for book is Buch!
WOOL and FLANNEL are distant cognates. Today, fashion stores often describe plaid shirts as ‘flannel’, but it is actually a soft woven fabric, originally made of wool, but now often cotton or synthetic. You might have a flannel pyjamas, which are lovely and cosy in the winter!
Today’s featured image is Marasmiellus candidus, a type of mushroom. You will often find the word ‘candidus’ used in botany or biology to describe something that is white, such as crocus candidus or the white woodpecker Melanerpes Candidus. There is even a white monkey called Propithecus candidus.
As you know, there is a vast number of different kinds of plants growing all over the world, from snowy slopes to Amazon rain forests to dusty deserts: plant life is everywhere. So how does it all work? Lets start with seeds.
Picture a seed – I am sure you have all seen them. It will have a hard outer shell to protect it. When it has found the right conditions of warmth and moisture, this shell will crack or split as a root pushes its way out to take hold in the soil. Then the plant will start to grow and a shoot will make its way upwards, with the root growing down, to draw moisture from the ground and provide some balance for the plant, keeping it firm in its place.
Just like you and me, plants need food to grow. Their food is very different from ours, of course! Here’s what they do: the leaves draw water up from the roots, through the stem, and they also soak up sunlight and air. These three things combine to make food in the leaves, where it is stored. Now think of an onion. It is formed to store the food for the plant.
