Our first SPIGOT of the year--all about ENERGY--is now online and ready for kids and classrooms. I was pleased to get a lot of questions about Trickles, the Teaching Guide that accompanies each issue. It wasn't online the first day that our ENERGY issue came out and obviously a lot of people missed it. Trickles is written for the teacher to help make lesson planning and teaching a little bit easier. For each article, Trickles offers vocabulary words, ideas for skill and comprehension lessons, the reading level, and links to the National Standards. It's all in the spirit of "good preparation makes for a good lesson."
With the ENERGY issue, we have begun posting a teaching/learning hint on our Trickles page. The first hint suggests that teachers in lower grades read the higher reading level pieces to the class, discussing and explaining along the way. For instance, the article, "The Great Escape," by NASA writer Tracy McMahan (p.17), has a reading level of 11.5. That means that the sentence length and number of advanced words make it suitable for someone reading on a high school level. However, younger students certainly would love to hear the article read to them. It's about all the energy needed to get people and equipment to the Moon to set up lunar outposts there. A person's listening vocabulary is much higher than his reading vocabulary. Having students listen and discuss with the teacher on a regular basis strengthens the students' recall and listening comprehension skills. In addition, the students will be accessing a lot more information that way too.

Val Girandola, Editor in Chief
Spigot Science Magazine for Kids and Classrooms