Science is fun and educational with Professor Gizmo and his Amazing Science Presentations. You will learn how airplanes fly, how gravity works, where weather comes from and more, through this award-winning science teacher’s zany experiments and the incredible, explosive gizmos he makes out of ordinary household items. Professor Gizmo-Amazing Science Presentations: Fun Science.

Additional videos under Kids Fun and Games.

via Ursi’s Blog

TeacherTube, as you might guess, is a video site with content that teachers (or parents) may find useful.   Started in March of last year, the site is a great resource for brushing up on your Earth Science or explaining electromagnetism.

via GeekDad 

 The folks at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories made their own LED pegboard and named it Peggy. You can change the design or message any time you like without rewiring it, and you can program individual lights to go on and off. You can make your own with a kit and some downloadable instructions. Link

via Neatorama

via Boing Boing

For any enthusiast of Pollock’s particular style of painting there’s a neat flash site by London based artist Miltos Manetas (original design by Stamen) which encourages the frustrated artist in us all to vent and create a drip-style masterpiece!

Tips: Click the space bar or enter button to erase your drawing and the mouse to change the color of your brush.

via Neatorama

1. BrainPOP
2. NASA Kids’ Club
3. Marvel Kids
4. 4Kids TV
5. Making of a Brick
6. Discovery Kids
7. National Geographic Kids
8. PBS Kids Go!
9. Exploratorium
10. Ask Dr. Universe

Have any other GEEKY kids sites to add?

via HowToons

- Thomas Edison

Not every kid likes “dress up,” and especially not most boys over a certain age.  My boys (9 and 10) still like dressing up, but only if it means wearing the garb of a medieval warrior (including weapons), ninja, monster, or pirate.

So, when I saw these tentacle arms for sale for only $15 an arm, I knew my boys would be enthralled with them.  I might buy them and hide them under their blankets, with just a slight bit of tentacle sticking out.

While we’ve been using our primitive, apelike arms like a bunch of jerks, the squids of the world have been clutching their prey with their superior tentacles and laughing at us. Until now! For the first time, you can have tentacles of your very own. Equipped with suction cups and plenty of creepy greenness.

And, speaking of giant sea creatures, you might want to listen to the related songs by Jonathan Coulton:

• I Crush Everything -written from the point of view of a giant squid
• Octopus – about, well, an Octopus

Note that not all kids will get JoCo’s humor like my kids do, nor will all parents find all of his songs appropriate.  The songs mentioned above have no swearing, but a few of his songs do.  Do your kids also like Weird Al Yankovic and Monty Python?
via BoingBoing

The 2008 Caldecott and Newbery Award winners have been announced and it looks like there are some great ones!  What’s most interesting about the Caldecott winner is that it is a 500 page graphic novel (read: comic book).

The winner of the Caldecott is  The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

“From an opening shot of the full moon setting over an awakening Paris in 1931, this tale casts a new light on the picture book form. Hugo is a young orphan secretly living in the walls of a train station where he labors to complete a mysterious invention left by his father. In a work of more than 500 pages, the suspenseful text and wordless double-page spreads narrate the tale in turns. Neither words nor pictures alone tell this story, which is filled with cinematic intrigue. Black & white pencil illustrations evoke the flickering images of the silent films to which the book pays homage.

The winner of the Newbery is Good Masters! Sweet Ladies!: Voices from a Medieval Village by Laura Amy Schlitz.

…thirteenth-century England springs to life using 21 dramatic individual narratives that introduce young inhabitants of village and manor; from Hugo, the lord’s nephew, to Nelly, the sniggler. Schlitz’s elegant monologues and dialogues draw back the curtain on the period, revealing character and relationships, hinting at stories untold. Explanatory interludes add information and round out this historical and theatrical presentation.

2008 Caldecott Honor Books are:

• Henry’s Freedom Box: A True Story from the Underground Railroad by illustrated by Kadir Nelson, written by Ellen Levine
• First the Egg, written and illustrated by Laura Vaccaro Seeger
• The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, written and illustrated by Peter Sís
• Knuffle Bunny Too: A Case of Mistaken Identity, written and illustrated Mo Willems

2008 Newbery Honor Books are:

• Elijah of Buxton by Christopher Paul Curtis
• The Wednesday Wars by Gary D. Schmidt
• Feathers by Jacqueline Woodson

via Everybody’s Libraries

Letterboxing is an outdoor hobby that combines elements of orienteering, art and puzzle solving. Letterboxers hide small, weatherproof boxes in publicly-accessible places (like parks) and distribute clues to finding the box in printed catalogs, on one of several web sites, or by word of mouth. Individual letterboxes usually contain a logbook and a rubber stamp. Finders make an imprint of the letterbox’s stamp on their personal logbook, and leave an impression of their personal stamp on the letterbox’s logbook — as proof of having found the box.

Some links to get started:

• Start Finding Letterboxes
• Getting Started (Creating a Letterbox)
• How to Make a Rubber Stamp
• Letterboxing 101
• Hitchhiker Protocol