Tomorrow, October 24th, is the birthday of the United Nations. To celebrate 70 years of the organization’s work helping to promote world peace and encourage global economic development, more than 200 iconic monuments, buildings, statues, bridges, and other landmarks in nearly 60 countries across the globe will be lit up blue. If you live […]
Last week we posted this awesome blog about how October is Anti-Bullying Awareness Month. In that blog post, we featured part 1 of a 3-part story called “Like Water to Ice” by Tyler Keevil. At the time, we promised that we would post parts 2 and 3 of the story later in the month. Well, […]
I’m pretty lucky as a mom. My daughter loves to read. My husband pointed out today that her book-bag weighs 50 pounds. There are exactly two spiral notebooks in it. The other 49.5 pounds come from books she’s reading for pleasure. I was a big reader as a kid, so it makes me happy […]
All around my neighborhood, kids are getting BOOed. Don’t worry, this isn’t the kind of BOOing that ends in tears or hurt feelings. This type of BOOing is actually a good thing. In this case BOOing is when one family leaves an anonymous treat for another family in their neighborhood and directs that family to […]
Let’s face it. Youth is wasted on the young. It took me… let’s say 29 years… to fully appreciate the splendor of autumn. My mom used to love to take us on family fall foliage drives or walks, and I just didn’t get it. It’s a bunch of leaves. They’ve turned lots of different colors. […]
As the editor of Cobblestone, It is rare for me to know nothing about a theme before I begin working on it, but that’s what happened with the October 2015 issue on Spiro. My colleague, Rosalie Baker, invited me to do a companion issue on the subject with Dig Into History, Cricket Media’s magazine about […]
Kids have an inherent drive to explore the world around them. At different stages and ages, this manifests in different ways. Sometimes it’s a hard thing to encourage (especially when the desire to explore the world expresses itself in the “must put everything I can find into my mouth and discover how it tastes” stage). […]
Cricket Media and the Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage are pleased to cosponsor the 2nd Annual Global Folklorist Challenge. This contest, aimed at kids from 8 to 18, is designed to connect kids with the local tradition bearers in in their communities, giving the tradition bearers an outlet to tell their own personal […]
Unless you’ve been avoiding the news lately, you’ve probably been hearing a lot of info about the planet Mars. Between the new movie, The Martian and the surprising announcement that water was found on the planet, both the scientific community and us regular folks have a lot of reasons to be excited about the red […]
If I made a list of my top ten parenting worries, close to the top would be bullying. I looked out for it when my daughter was a toddler making her first friends and now kind of obsess about it as we head into her tween years. Judging by how often this topic comes up […]