NG Kids
National Kids to Parks Day Is This Weekend
Celebrate America’s parks on May 19! Kids all over the country will be visiting parks this Saturday. Are you planning to visit a park with your family this weekend? Check out the National Kids to Parks Day website to find an event near you and register to participate. As the National Park Trust mascot Buddy Bison says, “Explore outdoors, the parks are yours!”
Did you visit a park for National Kids to Parks Day last year?
Do you have a favorite national park or state park?
Ask your parents to sign up at the official National Kids to Parks website.
(AD) Check out the National Geographic Kids National Parks Guide U.S.A.
(AD) Tell your parents about the National Geographic National Parks book and app.
See pictures of U.S. national parks on National Geographic Kids.
Photograph by Jim Neumann, My Shot
Phenomenal Friday Fact
Every year, Americans throw away 16 billion diapers, 1.6 billion pens, 2 billion razor blades, 220 million car tires, and enough aluminum to rebuild the U.S. commercial air fleet four times over.
Learn more about how to recycle and turn your trash into treasure. Help the kung fu trash master learn to recycle!
Photograph by Katinutt101, NG Kids My Shot
More than 114,000 young artists from across the country have submitted their drawings to the Doodle 4 Google contest, and now you can help select the winners! The drawings are all based on this year’s theme, which is “If I could travel in time, I’d visit…”
The competition was open to K-12 students in the United States. The entries are broken up into five different age groups, and you can vote for your favorite in each category. The national winner will be chosen on May 17, and the winning doodle will appear on the Google homepage on May 18.
Visit the Doodle 4 Google site to vote for your favorites.
Feeling creative? Submit your favorite photographs to National Geographic Kids My Shot!
Illustrations courtesy of Google
Phenomenal Friday Fact
A new gecko species has been found in Papua New Guinea. This black and gold striped gecko is called Nactus kunan, from the word, kunan, which means “bumblebee” in the local Nali language. Scientists think that this lizard’s coloration helps it stay hidden on the rain forest floor.
Learn more about the bumblebee gecko on National Geographic News.
Get the facts on geckos in this Creature Feature.
Photograph courtesy Robert Fisher, USGS
Phenomenal Friday Fact
The winners of the 2012 National Geographic Student Expeditions Photo Contest have been chosen from more than 1,800 entries. The contest was open to high school students across the country. Timothy Brooks, who snapped the grand prize winning photo above, will travel to London this summer for the National Geographic Student Expeditions London Photography Workshop. His winning photo entitled, Coyote Curled at Sunset, is shown above.
See all of the winners and finalists on the National Geographic Student Expeditions website..
Do you love to take pictures? Submit your favorites to NG Kids My Shot!
Photograph by Timothy Brooks
Celebrate America’s parks on May 19! Kids nationwide are gearing up for the second annual National Kids to Parks Day. “National Kids to Parks Day encourages children across America to get out and play. This simple idea of playing in a park can potentially give millions of kids the reason to get active and get outside just as families prepare for summer,” said Grace Lee, executive director of the National Park Trust.
Visit the National Kids to Parks Day website to find an event near you and register to participate. As the National Park Trust mascot Buddy Bison says, “Explore outdoors, the parks are yours!”
Ask your parents to sign up at the official National Kids to Parks website.
(AD) Check out the National Geographic Kids National Parks Guide U.S.A.
(AD) Tell your parents about the National Geographic National Parks book and app.
See pictures of U.S. national parks on National Geographic Kids.
Photograph by Joel Ocay, My Shot
Phenomenal Friday Fact
The National Geographic Kids website has been nominated for a 2012 Webby Award! The website is listed in the Website – Living – Youth category. NG Kids won the award in this category in 2010, and received the People’s Voice award in 2011.
NASA’s decommissioned space shuttle Discovery took a victory lap over Washington, D.C., today on the back of a Boeing 747. The shuttle was traveling to its new home at the National Air and Space Museum in Dulles, Virginia. Discovery flew by several iconic buildings as it passed over the the city, including the Washington Monument and the White House.
Discovery‘s first space voyage was on August 30, 1980. The shuttle flew 39 space missions over the next 30 years. Its last mission was a trip to the International Space Station.
See more pictures from Discovery‘s last flight on National Geographic News.
See space shuttle pictures on National Geographic Kids.
Watch a video about space shuttle history on National Geographic Kids.
Photograph courtesy Glenn Benson, NASA
Phenomenal Friday Fact
Every year, garbage and plastic bags thrown into the ocean kill up to 1,000,000 sea creatures!
Read about what kids like you are doing to clean up coastlines!
An 8.6-magnitude earthquake, and a strong aftershock, struck off the coast of Indonesia yesterday. The earthquake was followed by a small tsunami, unlike the December 2004 earthquake, which was followed by a major tsunami. “The waves were just below 1 meter [3.3 feet],” said Emile Okal, a geophysicist at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. “That is significant, but it’s not going to do much damage.”
The major earthquake that devastated Japan last year had a magnitude of 8.9 and triggered a deadly tsunami.
Read more about Wednesday’s earthquake on National Geographic News.
Read about the 2011 earthquake in Japan on News Bites.
Photograph by Heri Juanda, AP
Read the whole post »
Phenomenal Friday Fact
Around 10,000 homes in the U.S. run exclusively on solar electricity.
Check out a contest where students compete to build the best solar-powered house.
On April 15, 1912, the ship R.M.S. Titanic hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic Ocean. The giant ship, said to be “unsinkable,” sank quickly–it disappeared beneath the waves less than three hours after hitting the iceberg. More than 1,500 people died in the disaster, with only 710 survivors. The location of the Titanic was a mystery until National Geographic Explorer Bob Ballard found the wreckage of the iconic ship in 1985.
Sunday, April 15 marks the 100th anniversary of the disaster. The National Geographic Museum is commemorating the event with the Titanic: 100 Year Obsession exhibit. The exhibit takes visitors through Titanic‘s history, from the construction of the ship to the latest findings at the wreck site.
Are you interested in the story of Titanic?
Watch the two-night Titanic event on the National Geographic Channel beginning on Sunday, April 8.
See pictures of the Titanic shipwreck on National Geographic.
Get 10 cool facts about the Titanic on National Geographic Kids.
Read Tamar’s review of the National Geographic Reader: Titanic book on the DogEared Book Blog.
Photograph by Emory Kristof, National Geographic
Individuals, businesses, and organizations around the world participated in Earth Hour on March 31. This global observance is held to demonstrate how much we can do to cut back power use and stop climate change if we all work together. Participants shut off their lights from 8:30 to 9:30 p.m. local time, causing a wave of darkness to sweep across the Earth’s 25 time zones.
The next Earth Hour will be on March 30, 2013.
Get more power saving tips from National Geographic Kids.
Photograph by Jorge Sierra, WWF Spain
Happy April Fools’ Day! Well … not quite yet. This Sunday is the first day of April, which traditionally is the day when people play pranks on each other. No one is exactly sure how April 1 became the day to play tricks on people. One theory says that when the calendar year was changed so the year began at the beginning of January instead of April, those who were slow to start using the new calendar were called “April fools.”
Are you planning to pull a prank this year? What was your best prank ever? Leave a comment and tell us!
Read more about the history of April Fools’ Day on National Geographic News.
Photograph by Old Visuals / Alamy
Phenomenal Friday Fact
Did you know there are an average of 27 oil spills around the globe on a daily basis? Some are small scale, but others can be giant, like the Gulf Oil Spill that occurred in 2010.
National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence James Cameron explored the deepest point on the surface of the Earth for about three hours on Sunday before resurfacing. Although Cameron’s expedition to the Mariana Trench’s Challenger Deep location was shorter than planned due to a hydraulic fuel leak in his sub called the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER, he was able to get a look at the deepest ocean floor, which he described as bleak. “It looked like the moon,” he said. He didn’t see much in the way of sea life, either. “I didn’t find anything that looked alive to me, other than a few [shrimplike] amphipods in the water,” he said from aboard the research vessel Mermaid Sapphire.
Among the 2.5-story-tall sub’s tools are a sediment sampler, a robotic claw, a “slurp gun” for sucking up small sea creatures for study at the surface, and temperature, salinity, and pressure gauges. Although Cameron had originally planned to collect samples with the sub’s hydraulic arm, the leak made that impossible. Despite the setbacks, Cameron and the DEEPSEA CHALLENGER made history by making the deepest solo dive ever! Cameron, well-known for his films Titanic and Avatar is also an ocean explorer. He dived to the wreckage of the Titanic 33 times.
Read more about James Cameron’s dive on National Geographic News.
Read about the discovery of giant amphipods on News Bites.
See ocean pictures on National Geographic Kids.
Photograph by Mark Thiessen, National Geographic
Phenomenal Friday Fact
The average household throws away 13,000 separate pieces of paper each year. Most is packaging and junk mail.
BOOK NAME: Joshua Dread
AUTHOR: Lee Bacon
Check out the Joshua Dread blog post!
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BOOK NAME: Ashtown Burials: The Drowned Vault
AUTHOR: N. D. Wilson
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BOOK NAME: The Enchantress
AUTHOR: Michael Scott
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BOOK NAME: The Emerald Atlas
AUTHOR: John Stephens
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BOOK NAME: Chomp
AUTHOR: Carl Hiaasen
Winter is officially over. Today is the first day of spring! This day is also known as the vernal equinox. Many people believe that this is the day when daylight and nighttime hours are equally long, but is that really true? According to Geoff Chester, a public affairs specialist with Washington, D.C.’s U.S. Naval Observatory, the hours are equal before the equinox, although “exactly when it happens depends on where you are located on the surface of the Earth,” he said.
Learn more about the equinox on National Geographic News.
See pictures of flowers in bloom on National Geographic Kids.
Photograph by Mario Guzmán, European Pressphoto Agency
Andrew Evans, National Geographic’s Digital Nomad, recently spent some time penguin-watching on South Georgia Island, which is east of Argentina’s Terra del Fuego and north of Antarctica. Andrew watched the activities of a colony of king penguins. Read Andrew’s blog post on Digital Nomad.
Get the facts on emperor penguins on National Geographic Kids.
Photograph by Andrew Evans, National Geographic Traveler
Phenomenal Friday Fact
Tomorrow night, the planets Venus and Jupiter will be very close to each other in the night sky–3 degrees apart, which is about the width of two fingers held at arm’s length. These two planets are the brightest ones visible to the eye. When planets line up in the sky, it is called a conjuction. Although the planets may look like they are close together, they are really more than 448 million miles apart from each other.
Read more about the conjunction of Venus and Jupiter on National Geographic News.
See planet pictures on National Geographic Kids.
Photograph by Laurent Laveder, TWAN
