Many of the mishaps in folktales could be remedied if the protagonists knew some scientific principles.
STEM books and activities for fun
I’ve set myself the project of teaching science by telling mermaid stories. This means my stories must have a plot – not just a mermaid science teacher. So, I’ve got a mermaid. I’ve got one girl, Maia, who can see her. And one girl, Fig, who can’t. Trezzie has to play with both of them. That’s only fair. Even though it does get awkward when Fig sees a glass floating through the air, or gets her shoes wet for no logical reason. Trezzie, the mermaid, sees both girls playing together on the lakeshore. She decides today would be a good day to show them how to make a rainbow with a mirror and a glass of water. She digs into her treasure chest (which is full of things people have left on the shore of the lake – most of which looks like trash.) She selects a glass and a broken piece of mirror. Then she swims to the surface to show the girls. But (there’s always a but in these stories) when she greets her friends, the sky has become cloudy. Luckily Maia and Fig know lots of science-based tricks they can do with an empty glass and a piece of paper that don’t require sunlight. They keep Trezzie and each other amused while waiting for the clouds to blow away. These activities are all appropriate for young children to do at home in the yard, or even in the kitchen, where its easy to clean up spills. Do you have any questions about water? Tell me, and I’ll try to work them into future books. Right now, there are three: The Mermaid and the Rainbow The Mermaid and the Ice Cube Necklace The Mermaid and the Water Magnifying Glass
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What’s with “The Ugly Duckling”? I’m a biology and chemistry major. Swans never – absolutely NEVER --lay their eggs in other birds’ nests. Plus baby swans are cute – even by duckling standards.
To make matters even worse, the whole point of the Hans Christian Andersen story seems to be that outer beauty is important. The swan is only accepted when he becomes an adult. The other swans and ducks praise him as the most beautiful of all. It just doesn't happen that way -- and it shouldn't. It’s a misleading role model to show young children. No child wants to wait until s/he grows up to find out if s/he will be accepted, let alone praised as the most beautiful of all. They want to be accepted now. And they don’t need physical beauty to achieve that. The cuckoo bird provides a much more appropriate story. Cuckoos do lay their eggs in other birds’ nests. They particularly like to lay their eggs in warblers’ nests. They never raise their own chicks. Cuckoos are ugly. They smell bad. They eat about six times as much as a warbler chick. A mama warbler who gets one plopped into her nest has to work twice as hard as she would if she only had her own chicks to raise. But she does it. She’s not a martyr. She knows this interloper isn’t her own. She feeds it anyway. The arrangement is what biologists call mutualism. Cuckoo eggs hatch before warbler eggs. They grow to be bigger than warblers. If a predator, such as a cat, comes along and tries to eat the warbler’s eggs, that cuckoo is on guard. It will spray its stinky spray right in the cat’s face and save the unhatched warbler chicks. It will do the same after the warbler chicks have hatched. By taking care of the cuckoo chick, mama warbler has protected her own chicks. Francie and I like setting the record straight. Our tale of cuckoo and warbler will be our sixth Science Folktale. Just One More Egg is available for pre-order: mybook.to/eggThere will also be paperback and hardcover editions. As a former head science teacher, I’ve had a lot of experience with answering kids questions about science and setting up experiments that I’ve designed to inspire more questions.
I like to write about science. I also like to write about mermaids. I find that books are less interactive than a classroom. The biggest problem I have is reaching students who think science and imagination are separate things. Science is imagination combined with experiments. So, the question becomes how can I reach imaginative children in such a way that they will want to apply their imaginations to science? At the same time, how can I reach scientific children whom I can inspire to play with their ideas? Colleen Riordan of Wild Ink Marketing suggested I combine these types of books: science and mermaids. Mermaid Science! Thanks Colleen. This is a super way to appeal to both audiences: the imaginative and the scientific. One of the girls in this story is imaginative. The other is scientific. Since mermaids are imaginary friends, only Maia, the imaginative one, can see her. But Maia tells her scientific friend Fig what the mermaid is doing. The three of them make a good team. Because there’s a mermaid in the stories, I’m concentrating on water science. I plan to add physics in future books as well. Right now, I’ve got three Mermaid Science books: The Mermaid and the Rainbow (In this one, the girls and the mermaid do lots of water tricks, including making a rainbow using a mirror and a glass of water.) The Mermaid and the Ice Cube Necklace (Here the girls are having a picnic. Fig has brought ice cubes for their lemonade. The mermaid likes pretty things and wants a necklace made of ice cubes. They learn science as they work with the ice.) The Mermaid and the Water Magnifying Glass (This one includes fossils as well as the magnifying properties of a drop of water.) I’m working on more – including wicking and siphons, and other cool games to play with water. If you have any questions about water, please post them here. They may find their way into a future book of Mermaid Science. I’m still working on the lemon juice secret message project. Many children don’t know how to iron. Their first experience should be supervised, and the children in my story are not supervised when the find the lemon juice message. So my husband’s co-worker, Yuanyuan, suggested a 400 degree oven. After a few jokes about not setting the oven at 451 degrees Fahrenheit, we tried it. Her oven’s 400 degrees is hotter than mine. Her message was readable in 5 minutes. At 5 minutes, mine was just starting to appear. I had to wait 10 minutes to fully read my secret message. Here’s photographic evidence from my kitchen. The photo above is after 10 minutes. The photo below is after 5 minutes. The photo below shows the paper on a cookie sheet in my oven. The photo above shows the same paper out of the oven. Yes, that makes it easier to read. This in what it looked like after 5 minutes in my oven at 400 degrees Fahrenheit. This is the writing when it is still wet. Parts of some of the letters have started to dry, becoming invisible. This is the first step. Cut the lemon in half, and juice it. I do recommend a juicer, like the one in the picture. It's much easier than squeezing by hand.
How to Reveal Lemon Juice Secret Messages in the 21st CenturyIf you write a message on paper using lemon juice for ink, it will be invisible when it dries.
The standard method to reveal and read the secret message was to hold the paper against a light bulb. But that was an incandescent light bulb. These days we all have LED bulbs. LED bulbs are cool to the touch. They won’t reveal secret lemon juice messages. I’m writing a story in which the kids find a 100-year-old lemon juice secret message and they want to read it. Yes, they could use a candle or a stove burner, but I want the kids in my story to use a method that would be safe for my 10-year-old readers to use. So, I can’t have them playing with fire. I tried a heating pad. Even when I set the heating pad on its hottest setting, lemon juice ink remains invisible. I don’t use a hair-dryer, so my friend Jean tried it at her house. Again, the message couldn’t be read. Yes, it is still possible to buy incandescent bulbs, if you buy the new shatter-proof ROUGH model. They cost about $4 each. But I didn’t want the kids in my story or my readers to have to go out and buy something. I wanted them to use something they could find around a typical home. So, I tried my iron. To be honest, I buy no-wrinkle clothes and I haven’t used that iron in years, so maybe the settings aren’t accurate. But I tried it. I had to move the heat setting up to 6. (It goes to 8) before the lemon juice message became visible. I was using an iron when I was 10 years old. But do modern kids? After all, modern playgrounds don’t have jungle gyms or teeter-totters. They don’t have gravel that can skin kids’ knees. I checked on the Internet. I found one parenting blog that talked about ironing. This blog suggested that children as young as 8-years-old could be taught to iron simple things like pillow cases. A secret message is even simpler than a pillow case. Therefore, the kids in my story will use an iron to reveal the secret message. I’ll have the boy who helps his mother run the souvenir shop in town be the one who knows how to use it. Looking at things upside down or sideways can be fascinating. It’s even more fun when the object you are looking at doesn’t appear to be upside down or sideways because it makes sense the way it is. The same picture seen upside up and upside down may look like completely different pictures or words. Like pig and bid, depending on how you draw the g, so it looks like a B upside down.
Peter Newell is an artist, a storyteller, and a magician. He can tell a story from start to finish with one drawing – all you have to do is turn it upside down. His pictures fool the reader’s eye. They look completely different when you invert them. A palm tree becomes a leg. A monster becomes a duck. A ship becomes a bird. The stories are short and funny. The art is an astonishment every time I look at it. The current version is hard cover. Here is the cover of the original paperback version upside up. Here is an ambigram story from the middle of the book: And here is the final text ambigram, which is one word or two words, depending how you look at it. All the pages are short stories with beginnings and endings being the same picture upside down. Here are some more ambigrams: Here are the websites I used to research this article, and a few to play with and make your own ambigrams:
https://www.pinterest.com/rett/two-way-drawings/ https://www.pinterest.com/shanethowell/ambigram/ https://www.wowtattoos.com/collections/asymmetrical-ambigrams?page=4 ambigram generator: https://fontmeme.com/ambigram-font/ https://flipscript.com/en/flip https://newikis.com/en/Ambigram https://www.wikihow.com/Make-an-Ambigram https://www.qedcat.com/articles/ambigram.pdf http://www.palindromelist.net/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambigram http://mediafervor.com/ambigram-logo-design/ watc
Pulling Water Up Equipment needed: 1 floating candle 1 bowl of water 1 clear glass jar or drinking glass that fits over the candle 1 match to light the candle. When you light a candle, the heat from the flame melts the candle wax. Liquid wax flows up the wick where it is burned in the surrounding air. So, what happens if you cut off the air supply? And why are we doing this experiment with a floating candle? This experiment can be interpreted at different levels depending on the age of the child. A young child can enjoy the cause and effect result. Cover the candle with the glass. Watch the fire go out, watch the water rise inside the glass, and see fog form on the inside of the glass. Older children, about 10 and above, can appreciate the science at a more complex level. You’ve probably snuffed out a candle. You cover the flame, and when there isn’t enough air for the wax to burn, the fire goes out. Air is made of a combination of gasses. About 80% of air is nitrogen, which has nothing to do with a candle burning. About 20% of air is oxygen (O2), which is necessary for a candle to burn. Air also has small amounts of other gasses, like helium, and argon, which also have nothing to with fire. Fire needs air to be at least 16% oxygen in order to burn candle wax. Candle wax is a combination of carbon (C) and hydrogen (H). When the candle wax burns, the carbon in the melted wax combines with oxygen in the air to become carbon dioxide (CO2). And the hydrogen in the melted wax combines with oxygen to become water (H2O), which makes the glass look foggy. (I've posted a picture of the glass without the fog, so you can see the difference.) When the amount of oxygen in the air drops to 16%, the fire goes out, even though there is still plenty of gas surrounding the flame. Now, we come to the reason for doing this experiment with a candle floating on water. Watch what happens to the candle when the flame goes out. Water gets sucked into the glass to take up the room that the oxygen used to fill. The candle now floats on water that is higher than the liquid outside the glass. Water has been pulled up inside the glass. You can lift the glass higher, and see that the water level climbs along with the glass. You are pulling water up. This is a complex experiment. The first time I saw it was in an organic chemistry class. The teacher didn't know the 16% rule , and couldn't explain why the water didn't fill 20% of the glass when the candle flame died. But when my younger daughter was in 2nd grade, she was thrilled that she could make the flame go out and the water rise just by putting a glass over a floating candle. There's more to learn at every level. For example, carbon dioxide is somewhat soluble in water. Therefore while every Oxygen molecule that forms a Carbon dioxide molecule is replaced one-for-one, (One O2 plus 1 Carbon = 1 CO2) fewer gas molecules are actually in the air because some of them are in the water. In addition, when air is warm (as it is over a flame), the air molecules are further apart that when it is cool. So, when the flame on the candle goes out, the air begins to cool, and the air molecules move closer together, thus taking up less room, thus leaving space for the water to rise. There's lots going on here. Have fun with it.
The day my father saw a single stranded DNA helix in his electron microscope was the day his college mounted a brass double-stranded DNA helix model on the wall beside the building where he did his research. His students immediately unscrewed one of the helices from the wall and took it to his office. That was also the day that my fifth grade teacher asked us to find out the name for a 20-sided shape. I went home and asked my mom. She told me, as she usually did, “look it up.” I tried. We had a dictionary. You can’t look up “20-sided shape” in a dictionary. My grandfather had given us an encyclopedia. You also can’t look up “names for multi-sided shapes” in an encyclopedia. I planned to go to the library the next day. Then my father came home. He was in a good mood because of the single stranded DNA discovery. He asked what I was looking for in the encyclopedia. He’d just found something that wasn’t in it. I told him I was looking for something that also wasn’t in it. I told him my teacher asked us to find the name for a 20-sided shape. He said, “Icosahedron.” My father was a college professor. If he said that was the name, my teacher should be satisfied. I cancelled my plan to go to the library and look it up. The next day when I went to 5th grade, I told my teacher that my father had said the name was “icosahedron.” She said that was wrong. “The right name is ‘duodecahedron.’” I couldn’t go home and tell my father that he was wrong, so I didn’t say anything to him. I did check our classroom dictionary. The word icosahedron wasn’t in it. I didn’t tell my teacher that. A few days later, my father phoned about the time I got home from school. My mother drove to the High V grocery to buy meat. A couple of men named Mr. Watson and Mr. Crick were coming to our house for dinner. No, Mr. Watson didn’t have anything to do with Sherlock Holmes. And Mr. Crick didn’t creak when he walked, but he was much older and grayer than Mr. Watson or my dad. My mom wanted me to leave her alone so she could cook. She wanted to make sure the dinner was good so my dad wouldn’t yell at her in front of the guests. The men were coming to dinner because they were interested in my father’s single stranded DNA. It had something to do with genetics, which was how people inherit looks from their parents. Knowing if it was double stranded, or single stranded, or both was important. Our dinner guests had math from a scientist named Rosalind Franklin showing that DNA was double stranded. They were publishing a paper about it. They wanted to look at my father’s work to see if it should be included in their paper. Mr. Watson was also interested in my sister’s blue eyes. My mother has green eyes and my father has brown eyes, like my brother and me. He concluded that both of my parents must carry a gene for blue eyes because you can only have blue eyes if both your parents give you a gene for that color. The gene was made of DNA. The next day, my father took these men to his lab to show them his electron microscope. His DNA was from a virus that grew in the shape of an icosahedron. Theirs was from mammals. I went to school. My teacher said she had looked up “icosahedron.” She had found that it was just as good a name as duodecahedron for a 20-sided shape. Now that we had a name for 20-sided shapes, our 5th grade class made a combined art and math project -- building 20-sided shapes to hang from the ceiling of our classroom. Here's a video showing how to make an icosahedron. (You don't have to put the elements on the sides.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KyJ1TI6V7E Pouring Air
Air seems like an unlikely thing to pour. It’s all around us. If you hold an empty glass, you know it isn’t really empty. It’s full of air. If you are going to pour something, you expect it to be heavier than the substance you pour it into. That’s what happens when you pour water into the air-filled glass. Water is heavier than air. It can fall below the air, and push the air out of the glass. So, if you were going to pour air, where would you pour it? If you were in outerspace, where space is a vacuum, and you had a glass of air, you could pour that air, but you probably wouldn’t see anything. Now, you are on Earth. For this experiment, you’ll need: A glass full of air. (I recommend a plastic glass for this experiment, so it won’t break if you drop it.) A container full of water. (A bathtub, a sink, a bucket) How to do the experiment: Turn the glass full of air upside down. It’s still full of air. Keeping the glass straight upside down, plunge it into the container of water. Now, tip the glass, just as if you were pouring. What do you see? You have just poured air. Pouring can go up as well as down. Please visit my website: http://www.LookUnderRocks.com Make two ice cubes stick together
by Lois Wickstrom Ice cubes are solid blocks. You can slide them across the table. Or bounce them off each other. They float if you put them in water. One word you would not use to describe them is – sticky. Unless you were unlucky enough to lick a frozen pole on your playground when you were a kid, and found your tongue stuck to the pole. That bad luck happened because the liquid on your tongue froze, and as it froze, it stuck to the icy pole. So, the trick to making ice sticky is to get it in contact with liquid and then make that liquid freeze. You can do this by using one of the properties of ice. Ice melts under pressure. If you press flat sides of two ice cubes together, the pressure will make the ice melt right where the cubes are touching. But if you hold the two cubes together for about a minute, that liquid will freeze again. The new frozen liquid will act like glue – just like it did between the tongue and the icy pole. You can let go of one of the cubes you’ve been pressing together. It will be stuck to the one you are still holding. You have turned ice into water and back to ice again. And in the process, you have made two ice cubes stick together. if you like this type of activity, check out the STEM books at http://www.LookUnderRocks.com |
Lois Wickstrom
former head science teacher at Science in the City Summer Camp. Now writing STEM fiction and non-fiction Archives
March 2022
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