2 thoughts on “Kids Holiday Science Activities”

1. Hello. Somewhat unrelated, but I thought you might appreciate this bit of news I discovered.

   “While the Oxford University Press honored “selfies” as its 2013 Word of the Year, celebrating those quickly snapped self-portraits, Merriam-Webster is taking a more academic approach to its annual linguistic spotlight. The dictionary has declared “science” its 2013 Word of the Year. The honor is based on increased interest as measured by the number of people looking up a word over time. If you haven’t looked it up online, here’s how Merriam-Webster defines science: “knowledge about or study of the natural world based on facts learned through experiments and observation.” Science, according to Merriam-Webster Editor-at-Large Peter Sokolowski, is the word behind the news in 2013.

   “It is a word that is connected to broad cultural dichotomies: observation and intuition, evidence and tradition,” Sokolowski said in a statement. “A wide variety of discussions centered on science this year, from climate change to educational policy. We saw heated debates about ‘phony’ science, or whether science held all the answers.”

   The result, he said, was a 176 percent increase in lookups of the word “science” in 2013 compared with 2012. The second-most fascinating word of 2013 had a scientific bent as well, Merriam-Webster announced. That word was “cognitive,” defined by the dictionary as “of, relating to, being, or involving conscious intellectual activity (as thinking, reasoning, or remembering).”
   Best wishes for the New Year!

2. Thanks so much for your comment. That is excellent news, and better than finding “Amazbols” was at the top. I asked my seventeen year old if this was a word in common use, to which she replied “never use that word again dad…”. It is an interesting point though, as one of the reasons that we set up this blog was to address the issue that the label of “science” was being applied liberally to practically any form of inquiry, rather than to work that uses established empirical and inductive-deductive processes.
   Happy New Year all,
   Cheers
   Bernie

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