"Hank and Patrick watched as one bright star moved across the sky."
I was reading to the girl the other night, reading a charming book called What Happened to Patrick's Dinosaurs? At the end of the book, as the brothers watch the night sky, my girl interrupted me to tell me "a shooting star is not a star, it's a meteor". "How do you know that?" "From the science DVD."
I'd recently gotten her a copy of the latest kid release from They Might Be Giants (thanks to a hat tip from Cool Mom Picks). It's called Here Comes Science, and if you buy the physical CD, it comes with a DVD with cunning videos of all of the songs.
And you know what? It's excellent. It's got songs about blood, and songs about elements. They cover evolution and paleontology, and Roy G. Biv turns out to be the guy at the end of the rainbow.
They play with language, so there's one song about the sun that begins:
The sun is a mass
Of incandescent gas
and another that starts with:
The sun is a miasma
Of incandescent plasma
And the song that taught my daughter about meteors is a lovely little ditty that turns into a clever round.
The whole shebang is a great package - fun for kids, enjoyable by parents, and slyly educational. What more could you want?
Disclosure: I bought this record with my own money and no one paid me for this review.
13 comments:
Thanks for the tip. I love TMBG. We have "Here Come the ABCs". Owen learned all about trees from "C is for Conifer".
P.S. I think I'll get one for myself and one to send to Sarah Palin.
My daughter loves that book! For a long time she insisted that "extinct" meant "moved to another planet."
Also Radiolab did a show about They Might Be Giants which I think you'd like; it's called It Might Be Science.
(Disclaimer: Radiolab did a show about me and my kid. But I loved them before they did the show. We got Patrick's Dinosaurs from the library.)
Omigosh. We had all these records (yes, big and black and vinyl) with lots and lots of really memorable science songs, including the sun is a mass of incandescent gas (not the plasma one, though).
One had the rousing chorus: There's no disputin', there's no refutin', we're all indebted to Sir Isaac Newton.
One was about different kinds of rocks: Metamorphic, igneous and sedimentary/we are all solid members of the rock family
Does this new fangled CD/DVD thing have all of these too??
Love TMBG, for kids and adults! I will have to check this one out.
We love the TMBG kid stuff. Z adores Here Come the ABCs, and we've ordered the 123s for Christmas. We'll save science for next year.
Sidenote: My atheist coworker is buying the TMBG Science video for his newly evangelical presbyterian-preschool-going 4 yo in hopes that it will balance his world view. We'll see.
"Particle Man, Particle Man, does whatever a particle can, What's he like, it's not important, Particle Man". I love them. They're so weird. Like me. And my kids. "...and I'd buy a big prosthetic forehead and wear it on my real head." Agh, I'm STILL signed in as my nine-year-old son. Bibliomama
My husband has a bunch of those songs on a CD. I still think "Experimental Film" is their most enjoyable song, but certainly not the most educational.
I also enjoy Tom Lehrer's Elements song. Some day I will memorize all the elements. All of them! MWHAHAHAHAHAHA.
Well, if you really want to know what more I could want. Um. Can it also make laundry go into the HAMPER instead of next to the bed? There's some kind of science behind that, right? Like gravity? Or inertia? *sighs*
We have TMBG's ABCs and 123s CDs. Both excellent. ABCs includes C is for Conifer (taught Ada to identify conifers, important around here).
That sounds great. I used a Bill Nye Video (yes, for a VCR) in class a couple of weeks ago and the kids loved it.
Awwww....Roy G. Biv just brought me back to 3rd grade! That's how/when I learned the rainbow color spectrum. :-)
as a future Biology teacher, I would be short-changing my kids if I don't have this CD.
thanks for the tip.
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