Welcome to the Spigot Science Blog

Science is oh, so important for our kids and there are limited reading resources that are age appropriate for upper elementary/middle school kids.  Enter Spigot Science Magazine for Kids and Classrooms™, currently a FREE online e-zine.  We’re on a mission to provide relevant interdisciplinary content that relates to science, so kids will understand and embrace the joy and wonder that science brings to our lives.  This blog is designed for teachers and others who work with kids.  We want it to be interactive and stimulating.  We want you to want to come back every couple of weeks to gain some new ideas and news about what we’re doing to help kids (and teachers) Tap into Learning.  We especially want you to add your ideas to the conversation.

Spigot Celebrates First Anniversary

With the publication of our fifth issue, PATTERNS, Spigot Science Magazine for Kids and Classrooms celebrates it first anniversary.  Wow.  It’s hard to believe.  Right now all five issues, WATER, TREES, THE UNIVERSE, SIMPLE MACHINES, and PATTERNS can be downloaded for FREE at www.spigotsciencemag.com.

 Win a Book for Your Classroom Library

Ponder, our cute little mascot (find him in any issue) loves to make people think, observe, read, and learn.  He is inviting teachers to have their students become “pattern detectives.”  Read Patterns Are Everywhere on page 5 of our November, 2008, issue. Count the number of times the word pattern(s) appears on the page.  Email your best count to vgirandola@spigotsciencemag.com.

  Also tell us how you use Spigot in your classroom. Tell us what you like and what else you’d like to see in Spigot. From the correct word counts, we will select three winners.  They will be able to select a book from Dr. Richwine’s book reviews on pages 22-23 for their classroom library. 

Spigot Extra

Rubber Ducky Patterns (Contributed by Susan MacDougall)

In January, 1992, twenty-nine thousand plastic bath toys, including yellow rubber ducks, blue turtles, red beavers, and green frogs fell overboard in the North Pacific after leaving China.  In 16 years, they have traveled more than seventeen thousand miles and have washed up in Alaska, along the west coast of Canada and the United States, and in Japan and Hawaii.  Now, some have survived floating through the Arctic and have headed toward Maine and Massachusetts in the United States and are expected to start washing up in Greenland, Iceland, Norway, Ireland and Great Britain.  Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer is studying the paths the bath toys have taken as they float with other flotsam and jetsam through the massive Pacific Gyre, a large-scale swirling ocean current.  If you find one on the beach look for the words "First Years" to see if it is a real toy from 1992. 

Check out the patterns that some of these duckies, turtles, beavers and frogs have traveled at:

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/01/moby_duck.php

http://oceans.greenpeace.org/en/the-expedition/news/trashing-our-oceans/ocean_pollution_animation

For Discussion

What can we do to make Science come alive in our classrooms and in the lives and interests of our students?