Fostering curiosity in kids (and their parents) since 2011

Posts from the ‘Questions’ category

On an average day, my daughter’s question-to-declarative sentence ratio clocks in at a healthy 5:1. In this section of the blog, I explore what happens when instead of saying “I don’t know,” I say “Let’s find out!”

What’s that green and red-striped bug?

Yesterday we met some friends for a Sunday afternoon meander through the Spring Valley nature preserve in Schaumburg, Illinois. As part of her program of studying trees (a project made easy by the fact that the park has little signs identifying each of the major types in the preserve), The Seven-Year-Old came across a little green and red-striped bug crawling along an old log. What is that?

What is that rat-sized beetle?

On a recent trip to Field Museum, The Seven-Year-Old and I wandered into a tiny room downstairs that looks deceptively like a pleasant little reading nook. There’s a desk, a wall of butterflies, a collection of bugs trapped in amber, and rat-sized beetles. What are those things called?

What do you serve to a party of dragons?

It’s March, which means that any day now, The Six-Year-Old will morph into The Seven-Year-Old. The Six-Year-Old is slightly obsessed with dragons (and their Viking trainers) at the moment, thanks to Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon books, so we are planning a dragon (and Viking)-theme birthday party for her.  Naturally, the topic of what kind of birthday cake we should serve came up.

My daughter stands in the snow along the side of our driveway. The drifts are impressive, completely encasing our cars, but it is the fact that the snow on the ground (not drifts) is as deep as she is tall that catches my eye.

“How do you make snow cream?”

Pretty much the only thing my husband likes about winter is snow cream, so when we heard that Governor Patrick had declared a snow emergency for Massachusetts, we stocked up on condensed milk and vanilla so that we would be fully prepared once the snow finally arrived.