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Family Time: Leaf It Up To Us

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. […]

Spiro Who?

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 […]

Discovering Discoverer’s Day

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). […]

Enter the Folklorist Challenge

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 […]

5 Mars Facts That Will Wow Your Kids

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 […]

Putting Bullies in their Place

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 […]

Experimenting the Click Way

As the editor of Click, I test every experiment published in the magazine. Our goal is to present simple, hands-on activities that will inspire children to think, wonder, learn, and have fun! But some experiments just don’t work out the way you plan. Consider, for example, the short activity on page 16 of the […]

The Power of Music

October 1st marks International Music Day, which made me think of all the goodness that music brings into our lives. Is there anything else you can think of that has the ability to bring people of all ages, sizes, and cultural backgrounds together in harmony? Well, maybe chocolate, but besides that? Whether you make […]

Fail, uh, Fall Traditions

We’re all familiar with the traditions that Fall brings, including the end of white shoes, the disappearance of productive work days due to fantasy football, and the first Christmas trees in the mall. Autumn always makes me think of Aesop’s fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper,” where the lazy grasshopper plays all summer, while […]

Road Trip! Ideas for Trips Your Family Should Take Now

Labor Day snuck up on us, school has started, and the peak travel season is over. What does that mean? To me, it means road trip! As soon as the summer crowds start to dwindle and the temperatures moderate, I’m ready to hit some of the best tourist spots in my local area. Whether your […]