Tag Archives: science

The Ghost Post

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ghostbustersIt’s a special week for hoots and haunts, so we’re delving into the blog archive to deliver our most ghostly posties for your Halloween celebrations!

We’ll begin with the haunting of this prime piece of story time real estate. After reading I’m Not Afraid of this Haunted House (Carolrhoda Books, 2005), kids built a “Haunted House Kit” then headed into House 13 to bust some ghosts:

i-aint-afraid-of-no-ghostMoving on to a different house, different haunting, we read Ghosts in the House (Square Fish reprint edition, 2010). After crafting a classic ghost chest, kids had to locate multiple phantoms spirited away in our elaborate four floor dollhouse!

ghost in laundry room

If you’re looking for a delightful book to share this Halloween season, we highly recommend Gustavo the Shy Ghost (Candlewick, 2020). We paired our reading with a glow lanterns and gallery ghosts. And if you’d like to visit the studio of the book’s author and illustrator, Flavia Z. Drago, you’ll find that here!

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Want to get a little more sophisticated? Try building our tabletop Pepper’s Ghost illusion.  We also tried a more basic variation of the illusion using a phone and a plastic drink lid!

seeing spiritsFor simpler – but no less spooky – apparitions try this oatmeal container projector that produces a ghostly figure on your wall or door.

thats a big bunny 3And speaking of optical illusions, we dug through Cotsen’s special collections and discovered a really cool book from 1864. Spectropia allows the reader to experience the scientific concept of afterimages. The post contains multiple spooks for you to try!

book cover 3We’ll conclude our Halloween post with a ghostly guppy. We read Goldfish Ghost (Roaring Brook Press, 2017) and crafted this simple paper plate goldfish marionette that of course hangs upside down. It was quite a hit at story time!

ghostly guppie

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

Total Rock Star

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People might think rocks are totally boring and just sit there. But this book proves them all wrong! Turns out when it comes to eras, rocks win the time travel marathon, hands down! Why be sedentary when you can be…wait for it…sedimentary?

We read Old Rock (is not boring) by Deb Pilutti (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2020). Tall Pine, Spotted Beetle, and Hummingbird are convinced that Old Rock is boring. He doesn’t go anywhere, see anything, or do anything. But Old Rock explains how many millennia ago, he flew from a volcano, gazed at dinosaurs, rode a glacier, tumbled down a ridge, and watched a forest grow around him. It’s all about perspective!

You’ll need:

  • 1 small tissue box
  • 2 foam beads
  • A short piece of bamboo skewer (ours was 5″)
  • A 7″ paper plate
  • One time travel wheel template, printed on 8.5″ x 11″ paper
  • Tin foil
  • 1 rock
  • Box cutter, scissors, glue and tape for construction
  • Markers for decorating

We loved the idea of time passing for Old Rock, so we created this simply time machine project! Begin by placing a small tissue box on its side. Use a box cutter to cut a 1″ wide space in the sides and top of the box (leave the bottom intact):

Next, glue a foam bead to the center top of the box. No foam bead handy? Use a small snippet of drinking straw instead. Repeat with a second bead on the opposite side of the box. The bamboo skewer should thread easily through them, creating an axle for your paper plate:

Now for your spinning time travel wheel! Cut the template from the paper and color. A special shout out summer intern, Malaysia for her volcano, dinosaur, and glacier artwork! You’ll notice the final panel on the template is blank. That’s where kids can draw their own homes.

Use the bamboo skewer to poke a hole through the template and the paper plate. Thread the skewered plate through the foam beads to create your rotating time travel wheel like so:

Decorate the outside of the box with tin foil (we offered embossed foil paper and sparkle stems as well). If you’d like the “Totally Rockin’ Time Machine” sign, here is the template. Make sure not to cover the open mouth of the tissue box open – that’s your time travel machine’s viewfinder. Finally…the rock!

We didn’t have a supply of rocks handy, so we crafted these out of model magic. Just add grey craft paint and wiggle eyes and you have one very charismatic rock. Place the rock inside the time machine, spin the wheel, and watch the millennia fly by!

This book went over SO well at story time! It’s lovely, well-paced, and exciting. It’s no surprise it’s a multiple award-winner. The kids were absolutely riveted. But we were further delighted when, completely randomly, a youngster arrived with a couple rocks of his own! You can see them in the intro image, but we wanted to give his special rocks a portrait of their very own:

 

See SPOT Play

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See SPOT walk, see SPOT climb, see SPOT dance! This spring, we had the opportunity to host a very unusual guest at story time!

Meet SPOT, a four-legged robot created by Boston Dynamics. He lives on Princeton University campus and is part of a course titled “Robots in Human Ecology: A Hands-on Course for Anthropologists, Engineers, and Policymakers.” SPOT arrived with an amazing team of undergraduate handlers, plus plenty of plush toys to share.

Vivian Chen, Marisa Hirschfield, Aaron Serianni, Vasumathi Venkat, Zoe Rhodes

We started the program reading Boy + Bot, written by Ame Dyckman and illustrated by Dan Yaccarino (Knopf Books, 2012). The story is about the playful interactions between a boy and a robot, which fit perfectly with SPOT’s dynamic nature. After the book concluded, we had a short, 10 minute design activity in which young future engineers drew their own personal robots, and earned a paw print approval sticker from Team SPOT:

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Then it was time for the big show as SPOT entered the gallery!

The students did a fantastic job putting together a demo, answering endless questions from the audience, and just being enthusiastic about sharing what they study. One of my favorite parts was when they demonstrated how SPOT can be programmed to read and follow fiducials, which are basically QR codes representing numbers. SPOT scans the code, finds the number, and then completes a pre-programmed action associated with the number (like moving forward, turning, or extending his arm).

I asked Zoe Rhodes (seen above) what was the best lesson she learned from SPOT this semester. She replied:

“I would say the best lesson I learned from working with SPOT is the importance of making mistakes. We love it when things work out but most of the time we’re dealing with mistakes. But as I’ve worked with SPOT I’ve realized that these mistakes teach us so much more about ourselves and our capabilities than when things go correctly. It sounds a little cliche to say we learn from our mistakes but that’s really what robotics (and most things in life) are about. SPOT may fall down but we pick him right up and try again. In my opinion this makes the end product so much more fulfilling and exciting.”

I posed the same question to Vivian Chen, who added:

“The best lesson I learned from working with SPOT is patience goes a long way when working with robots and new technology!”

It was a truly magical story time, THANK YOU so much to the students and to professors Alexander Glaser and Ryo Morimoto for putting together such a tremendous program!