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Posts Tagged: kids
Youths Experience the Joy of Insects
Do you remember when insects first fascinated you or when you developed a love of insects? Odds are that the children who attend the SaveNature.Org...
Future entomologists? A group of students in a Bay Area three-week insect class, taught by SaveNature.Org, poses for a photo.
Getting up close and personal with a stick insect, also known as a walking stick.
A Honey of a Festival on Saturday, May 4
In the honey bee colony, you'll see a workforce like no other. You'll see nurse maids, nannies, royal attendants, builders, architects, foragers,...
A honey bee packing blue pollen from the tower of jewels, Echium wildpretii. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A honey bee in flight as it heads toward the tower of jewels, Echium wildpretii. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
The tower of jewels, Echium wildpretii, resembles a red-ornamented Christmas tree when it's in bloom. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
A Gathering of Beekeepers and a Gathering of Kids and Bees
Bee ready! This is the week of the 40th annual Western Apicultural Society's conference, set Sept. 5-8 at the University of California, Davis. The...
This is a scene from one of the Bee Girl programs in southern Oregon. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Red-Laird)
Youngsters are awed by the bee display, part of Bee Girl Sarah Red-Laird's activities. This is a photo from a southern Oregon program. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Red-Laird)
"Bee Girl" Sarah Red-Laird shows youngsters a hive. However, at the Sept. 5th program at UC Davis, the first graders will not be opening a hive. (Photo courtesy of Sarah Red-Laird)
This Bio Boot Camp Is Just for Teens
Teenagers who dig bugs and wildlife biology will love this! The UC Davis Bohart Museum of Entomology is again sponsoring two summer Bio Boot Camps:...
The 2011 UC Davis Bio Boot Camp featured a tour of the Harry H. Laidlaw Jr. Honey Bee Research Facility on Bee Biology Road. Here the campers crowd around beekeeper Elizabeth Frost as she opens the hive. Frost is now the education officer for honey bees at the Department of Primary Industries, New South Wales. (Photo by Kathy Keatley Garvey)
UC Berkeley's Sagehen Field Station, near Truckee, is a favorite of scientists. The UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology hosted a faculty/graduate student retreat there Friday, Oct. 14 through Sunday, Oct. 16. Here Professor Phil Ward (far left) searches for ants. (Photo by Sandy Olkowski)
PBS, Kids and Worms
Who doesn’t love cartoons and educational ones that aren’t boring are even better. So imagine my joy when I happened upon the PBS Kids series Wild Kratts! This show not only teaches about ecology, it is a lot of fun! There are imaginative inventions, good story lines and so far, always happy endings!
The show starts with a brief live action portion with the Kratt Brothers, Chris and Martin, and turns animated as they head out on various adventures. They can be rescuing Polar Bears or saving a shark from a dastardly chef villain who aims to make shark fin soup. It’s fast-paced enough to keep a smaller child’s attention, funny enough to make bigger kids laugh, and educational enough to teach even a Master Gardener a thing or two!
So why am I talking about a cartoon this episode, I mean blog? And seemingly one that has more to do with animals? Well, let me tell you they have an awesome episode about Pollinators.
One of the brothers gets miniaturized in order to get “up-close” film footage of bees at work and inadvertently ends up stuck to the bee and lost in the rainforest moving from plant to plant by different pollinators. I always thought a Pikachu was a type of Pokémon! Turns out they are cute little animals that live in the rainforest and they are also pollinators. I also had never heard of a Fig Bee (or Fig Wasp). Search Fig Wasp at the UCANR.org website.
The Kratt Brothers can also put on creature suits that enable them with a type of creature power that mimics an attribute of the featured creature. There is danger and suspense in many of the episodes, often in the form of the brothers needing to find something that their new animal friend is needing.
For instance, one of the full episodes that is available on the web at www.pbskids.org/wildkratts is the Mystery of the Squirmy Wormy. Why worms come to the surface when it rains. In it there is a short time where “Wormy” is in danger of drying out. It covers the answer to that question and some worm biology. Also, at the end in the live action sequence shows a quick description of worm composting. Can it get any better!?
Yes, yes it can. If you follow the links on their site, which is also filled with games and other educational fun, you’ll find tools for educators and parents that almost make one wish you were back in a classroom. But I think I like watching cartoons too much!
Kratt Brothers (from PBS show)
The Real Kratt Brothers
Wild Kratt and Worm Slime
