Tag Archives: Family Activities

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The Secret Lives of Animals: Book Review

Posted on October 13, 2015 | 4 comments

On the heels of their highly successful and informative books, The Truth About Nature and The Kids’ Outdoor Adventure Book, authors Stacy Tornio and Ken Keffer are back with another delightful and fact-filled book that illuminates nature, The Secret Lives of Animals: 1,001 Tidbits, Oddities & Amazing Facts about North America’s Coolest Animals. Also returning for the third book is talented illustrator Rachel Riordan.

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Like their other titles, The Secret Lives of Animals is colorful, easy to use, and appealing from start to finish. Animals are helpfully grouped by category, and each gets its moment in the sun, with illustrations, details and little-known facts.

Kids who are curious about animals will learn a lot about their favorites, as well as some creatures they’ve never heard of. Those who want to get outside to experience animals directly will find plenty of ideas. There is also terrific general science information to help explain concepts like migrations, taxonomies, the continental shelf, anadromous fish (I had never heard that term either), metamorphosis, keystone species, and how to tell a horn from an antler.

Inspired by the book, my family and I returned to some of our favorite activities, like crabbing, tidepooling, and making a bird feeder to attract and feed and local birds. We also took a walk to identify squirrel nests, looked at a spider web with a magnifying glass, and listened for animal sounds at night.

SFBay_Crabbing_6

tidestarfish

In addition, we learned a lot of fun facts about our animal friends and devised a quiz based on the tidbits in the book. See how well you do! (answers below.)

               Secret Lives of Animals Unofficial Quiz

  1. How do prairie dogs help their local grass?
  2. Are caribou and reindeer the same species?
  3. Do sockeye salmon change color after they spawn?
  4. What are baby mice sometimes called?
  5. Which animal dates back more than 300 million years and had a wingspan of up to 2 feet?
  6. Can you tell how old a rattlesnake is by counting the number of rattles?
  7. The Giant Pacific species of what animal weighs more than 600 pounds?
  8. How many species of fly are there?
  9. Can a sponge grow to be bigger than a human?
  10. What animal did Benjamin Franklin propose as America’s national bird, rather than the Bald Eagle?

                Quiz Answers

  1. They keep it trimmed.
  2. Yes.
  3. Yes.
  4. Pinkies.
  5. Dragonfly.
  6. No.
  7. Giant Octopus.
  8. 150,000.
  9. Yes.
  10. Turkey.

If you enjoyed playing along, you will enjoy The Secret Lives of Animals! I have one copy to give away. To enter, leave a comment below, listing either your favorite animal or one you want to learn more about. I’ll choose a winner using a random generator by Midnight, PST, Weds, Nov. 4. The winner will be notified by email.

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Posted in Deck Garden, Field Trip, Giveaway, Nature, Porch Swing, Reading, The Great Outdoors

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The Truth About Nature: Book Review

Posted on October 20, 2014 | 3 comments

TAN-screenshot-cover

How much do you know about nature? Fans of Stacy Tornio and Ken Keffer’s wonderful Kids’ Outdoor Adventure Book: 448 Great Things To Do In Nature Before You Grow Up, reviewed here last year, will be thrilled that the pair has returned with another charming and informative book that illuminates nature, The Truth About Nature: A Family’s Guide to 144 Common Myths about the Great Outdoors. Like their first book, this one also contains extremely charming illustrations by Rachel Riordan.

So, how much do you know about nature? This book will challenge your assumptions, as well as commonly held superstitions, in a fun way, using a “myth scale” that is easy to understand. Did you think that rabbits love carrots, tornadoes spin clockwise, only male animals grow antlers, and you lose most of your body heat through your head? Me, too! These are all myths, to varying degrees. Learning about these cleverly chosen myths is not only fascinating; some of Keffer and Tornio’s myth busting promotes health, such as the knowledge that you can indeed get a sunburn on a cloudy day, dogs’ mouths aren’t really cleaner than ours, and clear water isn’t always safe to drink.

The Truth About Nature also contains wonderful hands-on activities and experiments, like making slime or creating a cloud in a jar, so kids can experience some of nature’s wonders for themselves. Learning about myths, cleverly divided by season, one can’t help but become more engaged with and curious about nature. Like many of the best nature books, this one will have readers looking and listening a little more carefully outdoors, perhaps on a hunt for a mushroom fairy ring, a rare songless bird, a river that seems to flow upstream, or, yes, a female animal with antlers.

The authors are also running a cool contest:

Win a School Visit and free copies of The Truth About Nature. Enter a video or photo that features a common outdoor myth between September 22 and November 23, 2014.

Here’s that giveaway page. And be sure to check out the authors’ website, Destination Nature.

Got any nature myths or surprises you’d like to share? Let me know in the Comments.

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Posted in Nature, Reading, The Great Outdoors

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Look Up! It’s The Perseid Meteor Shower

Posted on August 10, 2014 | 2 comments

You might see a lot or you might not see many, but if you stay in the house, you won’t see any. — EarthSky Magazine

 

The annual Perseid meteor shower is coming our way. Anyone who lives in the Northern Hemisphere may be in for a good old-fashioned sky show, just by looking up.

The Perseids are debris from a wandering comet that appears as shooting stars each August. (Records of this light show go back to 36 A.D., though the Swift-Tuttle Comet was discovered much later.) They often provide one of the best shows of the year, if the skies are clear and the moon is not full. Because the Perseids follow the full moon by only two days this year, the show may be less spectacular than usual.  :(

The peak of of the show will be Tuesday, August 12 around 3 am local time. Sometimes meteors can be seen up to a week before and after a shower’s peak. Astronomers are predicting as many as 70 meteors an hour for those who are able to see the Perseids. (That said, we always see fewer meteors than these predicted numbers, so don’t be disappointed. One fantastic shooting star blazing through the sky can produce lifelong memories and awe.)

You won’t need any special equipment to see the Perseids. The naked eye is actually best. Just be sure to give your eyes some time to adjust to the dark. And hope for a good show! Here are more tips for viewing the Perseids.

The San Francisco Chronicle offers more information about the Perseids, along with some good viewing tips and a sky map.

If you like, you can even be a citizen scientist and help NASA count meteors! Download a free app for iphones and androids and join the meteor count. (Here are more citizen science projects you might be interested in.)

Some of my family’s most relaxed and memorable moments have occurred while gazing at the stars together. You can’t help but be infused with a sense of wonder, history and mystery while contemplating the cosmos. It’s natural to share those feelings with those around us, as we use the stars to try to look back through distance and time.

My family remembers one especially wonderful August, when we went to the top of our nearest mountain to see the Perseid meteor shower. Lying in the grass in the dark, we could hear choruses of “oohs” and “aahs” coming from all around the mountain,

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