



Greek Mythology is pretty great. It is entertaining, educational, and the myths are full of some bizarre stuff that your kids will love. I don’t know exactly why children love Greek myths; maybe it has something to do with kids trying to make sense of the world just as the Greeks were, or perhaps it is just good storytelling. There is no denying that before scientific explanations gave us the answers to so much, the Greeks came up with some pretty great reasons for the unexplainable.
How did the Greeks explain lightening? That is just Zeus getting angry and throwing his thunderbolts around.
Why is there sometimes dew in the morning? Its Eos the Goddess of Dawn tears.
Although there are plenty of beautiful stories in the myths, a lot of the characters in Greek myology are pretty terrible, and they do outrageous things. With all the patricide, infanticide, matricide, torture, killing, revenge cannibalism, and lots of other awful behavior, you might be wondering how to teach your kids about the myths in a kid-friendly sort of way. We can show you where to start since we have some great books and websites that they will love.
There is a fantastic selection of excellent Greek mythology books that are written for kids. If you are just starting, the book to get is the D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. Everyone loves this book (including my six-year-old son and me). This book is fantastic. It was written in 1962 by the husband and wife team of Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire, and it is considered a classic. With its quirky and beautiful illustrations and matter of fact telling of the myths, it is perfect for children. Some of the language is a bit advanced for younger kids, and you might have to stop to clarify what is going on in a particular myth, but this is an excellent choice to help kids learn about Greek mythology. You can most likely get this book at your local library. If you are looking for a starter book, this is the one to get.
The series that has launched millions of kids into the world of Greek mythology is, of course, the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. It is for slightly older kids (the recommended age range is 8 to 12), but if you have an avid reader, you could probably go a little younger. This series was written by a former middle school teacher, who mixes ancient mythology with modern adventure, and it is unbelievably popular. If you are looking for a sure thing to get your kids reading and learning about Greek mythology, this is it.
Another author who does a great job making Greek Mythology appealing for modern kids is Joan Holub. She writes the very popular Goddess Girls series and well as the Heroes in Training series. These books are for a younger crowd who might not be quite ready for Percy Jackson. They are easy readers and for kids ages 6 to 10. Goddess Girls deals with the idea of what Greek goddesses would have been like at middle school, so lots of drama ensues. While Heroes in Training is about what the Gods would have been like as ten-year-olds.
Mythology The Gods, Heroes, and Monsters of Ancient Greece (Ologies) is part of the beautiful and top-rated Ology series. This book is a little hard to explain, but basically, it is a 19th-century textbook that was written but the fictional author Lady Hestia. The textbook has been taken along to Greece by Lady Hestia’s friend, the fictional John Oro, who writes notes in the book chronicling his journey through Greece looking for treasures. This book is jam-packed with beautiful illustrations, cool treasures (including a feather pen!), and lots of information about the Greek myths.
As a bit of a Ken Jennings fan, I have to recommend his Greek Mythology book for kids. This one is for ‘brainy’ kids who want to learn about the wonderful and wacky world of the gods. It is written in a fun and humorous way your kids will enjoy reading, and it has lots of illustrations, trivia, and quizzes to keep your kids entertained.
Since the myths can be a bit confusing and hard to remember, you may want to help reinforce what your kids are learning through online games or websites. Here are a few to have a look at:
Another easy way to help kids learn about the myths could be through Mythic Warriors: Guardians of the Legend. It is a TV series that is a little cheesy, but quite good as far as explaining some of the myths. You can watch the episodes for free on YouTube. It’s an older show made in 1998 that ran for two seasons, and it pretty much covers all your kids need to know about the Greek gods.
Another option is a short Greek Gods video from the History channel. It can sometimes be a bit hard to keep all the Greek gods straight, so if your kids need a little refresher, this is a super short video that gives a good overview of who is who on Mount Olympus.
The History Channel also has a pretty well-known series called Clash of the Gods. It featured stories about Zeus, Perseus & Medusa, Odysseus, Hercules, etc. that is good. You can watch several episodes for free on YouTube, although this series isn’t appropriate for kids, parents are looking for something to watch it’s pretty good.
If you have any Greek Mythology books or sites that you love, let us know in the comments below.
Geography, in the very broadest terms, is the study of the Earth’s landscapes, people, places, and environments. Kids love to learn about the world, and these days there are some exciting ways to help take your kids on a fun journey around the globe without ever leaving your living room. So if you are looking to spark an interest in this fantastic world of ours, look no further, because we have found 19 super cool resources that your kids should know about.
An easy way to get kids interested in the world is through a fun website (since most kids will take any chance to be online that they can get). Here are a few of our favorites:
You can’t beat a good geography book, and there are lots of great ones to choose from.
One of the best TV shows that I have come across that helps kids learn about the world is, Are We There Yet? It is a short show (each episode is about seven minutes long) that has a brother and sister who travel around the world learning about different cultures and countries.
Another show that everyone loves, but it is short of showing its age, is Where in the World is Carmen Santiago. Just in case you aren’t familiar with Carmen Santiago, it is an educational franchise that has computer and video games, a television series, and books that teach kids about geography. If you are feeling nostalgic, you can watch many of the episodes on YouTube.
So as you can see, there is no shortage of fun resources that you can use to help your kids learn a little bit about geography and the world. If you have any great resources, please let us know in the comments below.
Chemistry can be a fun and fascinating area of science for children to explore at home. Learning about chemistry can help kids develop their analytical skills, help them understand how things work, and it can lead them into a wide range of rewarding careers later on in life.
So if your kids are showing an interest in chemistry or you would like them to start to learn about it, we have found lots of excellent introductory resources that will hopefully lead them that learning about chemistry and science can be super fun and exciting.
The best way to introduce chemistry to young kids is to show them what chemistry can do. There are lots of fantastic books that have experiments for kids, as well as some excellent books with overviews of what chemistry is all about. Our favorite chemistry books for kids are:
There are thousands of interesting online chemistry videos. They mostly involve high school or college kids, blowing things up. If you are looking for some suitable online chemistry lessons for smaller kids, we found some great videos that have a few of the ‘classic’ beginner experiments that are a good starting point to getting kids interested in chemistry.
There is a lot of grumbling online about the modern chemistry set. Partly because of liability concerns and regulations, the contemporary chemistry set often doesn’t even include any actual chemicals. Don’t worry; there is still a lot of really excellent beginner chemistry sets available that will help your kids learn to love chemistry (despite not being able to blow anything up).
A good place to start if you are looking for a high-quality chemistry set for kids is with the company Thames & Kosmos. They have a nice beginner chemistry set, or if you are looking for something a bit more serious, they have a series of sets called The Chem series that has four sets starting from a very simple Chem C500 up to their CHEM C3000 (V 2.0). These sets would be great for kids who are showing a serious interest in chemistry, not for a beginner.
Another good beginner kit for ages 5 to 10 is the Sciencewiz Chemistry Experiments Kit and Book 35 Experiments, Chemistry. It comes with all the materials your kids will need to perform 35 experiments. Some of the experiments include how to make candles, squirt with water pressure, sink and float an egg, dye a flower from the inside out, squeeze an egg into a bottle, capturing a CO2 explosion and growing crystals.
If you are looking for a chemistry set for a child who loves the series The Magic School Bus, there is a fun Magic School Bus – Chemistry Lab is great for kids ages 5 to 12. Some of the experiments included in this kit are: how to make sticky ice, use litmus paper, measure pH, perform chromatography, make bubble sculptures, wake-up fungus, create slime, form a bouncy ball, learn about density, produce a milk rainbow, plate copper, explode a volcano and more.
If you are looking for a simple set for kids ages 4 to 8, you could try the POOF-Slinky 0SA221 Scientific Explorer My First Mind Blowing Science Kit. It is a smaller and cheaper kit than the ones listed above. This kit only has 11 experiments, so it’s pretty basic, but it’s an excellent intro to chemistry for very young kids.
A good kit that focuses on crystal growth is the POOF-Slinky 0SA230 Scientific Explorer Ultimate Crystal Growing Kit. This kit is appropriate for kids ages 9+, and it is all about growing crystals. It has the materials and the instructions to let kids grow 13 different types of crystals.
For those of you who like to live a little more dangerously and want a bit more excitement in your kid’s chemistry set, you can always make your own. The internet is a great place to find info on how to do this. Check out Great Balls of Fire on Makezine or Bob Thompsons Homeschooler Chemistry Set for the ultimate instructions on how to create DIY chemistry set for your kids. There is also a good thread here that has some great info if you want to build chemistry set from scratch.
Hopefully, you found something that you can use to help get your children interested in chemistry. If you have any resources that you have used to help your kids learn chemistry that you think are helpful for kids, let us know in the comments below.
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aMetal Math is the solving of mathematical problems using nothing but the human brain. In its most basic form, mental math can refer to doing simple addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division problems in your head. It can also refer to math tricks and secrets that give people the ability to do much more complicated math problems in their heads quickly.
The ability to do math in your head is a very important skill for children to master, and it will be useful to them throughout their lives. It is worth the effort to get your kids interested and excited about math because there is research showing that children’s proficiency in math correlates strongly with their future earnings, and an excellent way to go about doing this is by helping them become good at mental math.
This post has a mix of resources that can help with mastery of basic math, as well as resources that help learn mental math tricks.
There are lots of great math books that give excellent overviews of the best mental math strategies and tricks that are useful for kids to learn. It was a little hard to narrow down the list, so we are including all of our favorites. Check your local library for these titles, as they are all pretty popular books and will probably be available (for free!)
If you are looking for mental math books, a couple of titles that you will come across often are Short-Cut Math by Gerard W. Kelly and Secrets of Mental Math by Arthur Benjamin and Michael Shermer. These are great books to help older children to learn mental math, but we wouldn’t recommend getting these for anyone younger than 13 or 14 years old because they are written for an adult audience and would probably be a bit too much for younger kids.
If you want your kid to get good at mental math, they will need to practice. It is generally recommended to do at least 15 minutes a day of math practice. An easy way to get kids to practice is with some fun workbooks. Here are a few that have great reviews.
Apps are sort of perfect for having kids practice their mental math. There are so many math apps to choose from that would be helpful to mental math practice we tried to narrow it down a bit, here are a few of our favorites:
Schoolhouse Rock: Multiplication Classroom Edition If you are looking for something a little retro that reminds you of your childhood, check out this DVD. It’s not for everyone, but worth a look if you were into Schoolhouse Rock as a child.
For a slightly older child who has mastered the basic math facts have a look at this very watchable series on some of the more common mental math tricks:
Sometimes kids just aren’t into the worksheets and books, so you need a little bit of a different tactic. Here are some fun games that will help your kids with their mental maths without them even realizing they are learning.
Luckily for parents, many mental math secrets are readily available online. Here are a few sites that break down some of the more common mental math secrets that kids can learn.
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The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way is a fascinating book by Amanda Ripley, that sets out to find out why the United States is doing so poorly on the standardized PISA test (which is given to 15-year-olds around the world and tests them on reading, mathematics, and science.)
1. The top-performing countries believe in academic rigor. Teachers, politicians, parents, and kids in these countries agree that school should be about mastering complex educational content. Students are expected to take school seriously, and there are high expectations from teachers, parents, and the students themselves about what the students can accomplish. Comparing the American education system, Ripley writes of several disturbing examples, where education boards seem almost afraid to encourage students to aim for a high academic standard. These boards are scared that a large percentage of the students just aren’t up for the challenge, and will be destroyed by failing.
2. Teachers need to be the best and brightest of society and need to be highly trained. Only the most promising students get into Finnish teacher’s colleges, where they spend six years studying. Students and parents highly respect teachers because they know how difficult it is to become a teacher. Getting into a teacher training school in Finland is as prestigious as getting into medical school in the U.S. Ripley provides lots of examples that prove that when the teachers are highly educated, the quality of the teaching goes up.
3. Factors that people assume to be important to student outcomes, like government spending per student and private education, had little effect on academic performance. Poland is a particularly good example of the lesson that more money doesn’t necessarily make a great school. After education reforms in Poland, polish students outperformed the U.S kids in math and science despite spending less than half what the U.S did per child.
4. Investment in classroom technology doesn’t equal better academic outcomes. Of the schools profiled in this book, there was little or no technology available in the classrooms. Many of the most successful education systems don’t even allow students to use a calculator in class.
5. Failure wasn’t considered shameful, but a normal part of learning. Students who were having difficulty with schoolwork were given the best help available until they caught up. In Poland, students were graded on a 1 to 5 system (lowest grade being 1, and the top a 5.) An American exchange student in Poland observed that when students’ exam scores were announced in front of the class, no one ever got a 5, and none of the students seemed too bothered about it. “If the work was hard, routine failure was the only way to learn.” Ripley uses examples to compare that to the American system and shows that many educators believe failure in American schools is demoralizing, and to be avoided at all costs.
6. Math skills are vital in the modern world, and more value must be placed on math education in schools. Math is a very strong predictor of future earnings, with math skills becoming more and more valuable in the global economy. Ripley laments the pervasive idea in the U.S. that math is an innate ability, and that you’re either good at it or you aren’t. As a counterpoint, the education superpowers treat math as a skill that is developed through hard work and perseverance. These countries believe that with the right teachers, who have strong math training themselves, children’s math scores will improve. This is because there is a strong relationship between a teacher’s ability in math and the student’s results.
A Finnish teacher needs a master’s degree in math to teach. In North America, many teachers have liberal arts-based backgrounds, and they aren’t necessarily as strong in math. Because math lessons build upon what has come before, if a student doesn’t understand a particular concept, it’s easy to fall behind quickly and become discouraged. In high performing countries, children are not allowed to give up on math, as they are in American schools. It is regarded as a skill that must be learned.
7. Teaching higher-order thinking and reasoning is critical. The Smartest Kids in the World spends a lot of time stressing the importance of math in schools, and reminding the reader that math isn’t just math: “Math is a language of logic. It is a disciplined, organized way of thinking. There is a right answer; there are rules that must be followed.” Since more and more jobs are requiring these kinds of skills, kids need to be able to adapt and be prepared for the modern job market.
8. No education system is perfect, but they are dynamic and can change quickly. Ripley writes, “Everywhere I went, in every country, people complained about their education system.” She says this is a universal truth. Of the three countries examined in this book, some lessons can be taken from all of them about changes that can be made. One of the big lessons is that it’s possible to make radical changes to education systems that will improve student outcomes in a relatively short period. Poland is an excellent example of this. Despite high rates of crime and poverty, the government rolled out dramatic education reforms in 1999. The PISA tests were able to show the test scores from the old education system in Poland in 2000, and then after the reforms were in place in 2003. In only three years, the PISA scores went up dramatically for the Polish students, to the point that they were able to catch up to all of the developed countries in the world and surpass the U.S. within a few years.
9. What parents do at home to help their kids matter more than what parents do at school to help their kids. The common idea in North American society is that the more involved a parent is with their child’s school, the better the child will do at school. Ripley, however, found that volunteering or fundraising for the school has little or no effect on children’s PISA scores. Her research showed that what’s more important is very simple: reading to kids every day when they are young and then engaging them in conversation as they get older, about things that matter, and will get them thinking. Getting kids to become strong readers and thinkers is strongly influenced by what the parents do at home, not at school.
10. There is more than one way to become an education superpower. Finland, Poland, and Korea all have very different systems. Finland’s approach appears to be ideal, with the key being the highly trained and carefully selected teachers. Poland’s approach has some great lessons on how to make dramatic changes to education quickly. Korea’s system, despite its exceptional PISA scores, is probably not the one that other countries should be aiming to emulate. Ripley goes into great detail about what a typical Korean student’s day is like, and it seems pretty horrible. Kids attend a regular school for lessons, but after school, when most American students would head home, many Korean students stay until about 9 p.m. and clean the school, study, take extra exam prep classes and watch online test prep videos. After they leave school, they go to private tutors until 11 p.m. These kids are living in the classrooms for up to 12 hours a day, and they do nothing but study. Even the Minister of Education in Korea doesn’t think the Korean system is deserving of all the praise it’s getting from other countries.
If you are interested in education and what it takes to make a great system, The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They Got That Way is a great read and well worth picking up.
***The appendix of the book includes advice for on what to look for when choosing a school: