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Secret Codes and Spies

Kids love to play spy. My boys drool over all the fancy spy toys at the store. Those toys are fun, but you don’t need special toys to be a spy. Spies do need undercover disguises though. Dig through the dress-up box. They might also like some sunglasses, a flashlight, and one of Dad’s hats. And spies need secret codes for their messages. (Don’t tell them that they are reading and writing, and using logical thinking skills.) You should tell them that coding and decoding messages is a science called cryptology. One of the simplest codes is to write words … Continue reading →

Fun With Morse Code

Morse code has a very interesting history, in many ways this simple code led to modern day communications. In Morse code, the letters of the alphabet are represented by dots and dashes. It’s also one of the few codes that can be communicated by light or sound. It can even be done with flags (a flag to the left is a dash, to the right it represents a dot. It’s fun thing to know, but it’s also saved a lot of lives. Morse code was what telegraph operators used. It’s still used on ships and in other emergency situations where … Continue reading →

Pig Latin

Remember “Pig Latin”? It really doesn’t have anything to do with Latin, but it is a fun language game. You can either share these language skills with the kids or use it as a way to talk around them if they’ve already learned to spell. Some “Pig Latin” words have actually become regular scram words. Does “amscray” for “scram” sound familiar? To play at Pig Latin, take away the initial consonant sound of a word, and put it at the end of the word followed by the “ay” sound. So “boy” becomes “oy-bay”, “door” becomes “oor-day”, and so on. If … Continue reading →

Free Admission to the Queen Mary

Do you live in Southern California? Through April 30, California residents get free admission to the Queen Mary. If you don’t have plans for Sunday or Monday, it’s a nice outing. The normal price is $22.95. For what it is, that’s pretty steep. But FREE is a fantastic price. When it’s a freebie, I usually print out the press release in case the ticket taker hasn’t seen it. The Queen Mary tour is self-guided. In other words, you go at your own pace, spend as much or as little time as you want in each part of the ship. If … Continue reading →

The Encyclopedia Brown series by Donald J. Sobel

I love taking trips down Memory Lane to recall the books I enjoyed as a child. Today’s middle grade books aren’t quite as innocent as they used to be, and it’s refreshing to go back in time and remember books that were just simple, light stories. One of my favorites was Encyclopedia Brown. Published in the 1960s, they weren’t fresh from the press when I came along (I was born a decade later) but the appeal is timeless. Encyclopedia’s father is the chief of police, and every so often he gets a case he can’t solve. When this happens, he … Continue reading →

Special Places, Special People, Special Traditions

My girl is a funny kid. We make bi-weekly trips to my parent’s house (they watch her two Fridays a month) and when we arrive she basically denies loving the books and music she enjoys at home. It is as if she morphs into a slightly different child with different interests and new favorite things. Before we discovered this, we would often bring her newest favorite stuffed animal or the CD she just can’t stop listening to over her grandparent’s house. We thought she would be excited to share these passions with her grandparents. Nope. She would have nothing to … Continue reading →