Kid Chat: Let the Imagination Travel. Part 1
June 4, 2008 at 7:00 am | In Just For Fun, Uncategorized | Leave a Comment
It’s June, which means that kids across the country are anxiously awaiting the closing school bell. But June also means that family road trip season is just around the corner.
When I was growing up, my parents were avid fans of the family road trip. Once classes let out, my mom and dad piled me and my brother and our two dogs into the trusty family station wagon and set off for Missouri, the state all my grandparents called home.
It was a long drive from Minnesota to Missouri — eight hours to visit one set of grandparents and twelve hours to reach the other pair. And of course, because we were kids, my brother and I peppered the trip with petty arguments and the ultimate of all annoying questions:
Are we there yet?
Perhaps, if my parents had stuffed the glove box with a copy of Kid Chat: 204 Creative Questions to Let the Imagination Travel, my brother and I would have had something else to occupy our minds.
The book’s authors, Bret Nicholaus and Paul Lowrie, came up with more questions than the summer is long to keep road tripping families from falling prey to the Are-We-There-Yet complaints. The book is overflowing with fun travel-related discussion starters that will pique everyone’s attention and encourage all bodies in the car to chime in.
For example, question 59 reads:
If you had to carry a suitcase with you everywhere you went and it always had to contain the same things, what would you put in it?
Or try question 196:
If you could do something to a rest area to make it really cool, what would it be?
Take Oprah’s Millennium Challenge
May 28, 2008 at 7:00 am | In Just For Fun, Uncategorized | 1 Comment
In a previous post I wrote about Oprah Winfrey’s plan to get more American kids interested in the world beyond U.S. borders. Her newest organization – O Ambassadors – encourages teens to get involved in volunteer mission work in developing countries.
Now I’ve spent a bit more time tooling around on her new site. I’ve discovered a fun online game that’s a part of the site.
The game is called the Millennium Challenge.
It’s like a board game except it’s on your computer screen. Your character clicks the spinner, moves the number of spaces the spinner says, and then you draw a card from the stack to see what it says.
Some of the cards are simply trivia about other lands. Other cards give you a task to complete that will help you learn something unique about another place.
But you can’t just willy nilly complete the cards. If you don’t finish your job in the given time, or if you didn’t read the directions and do it wrong, your character will be punished and you’ll have to move backwards.
It’s pretty fun. I recommend you give it a go and hop on over. But player beware.
The game does play a song that gets pretty annoying after a while. I was muting before I knew it.
Free Rice for Fun
April 24, 2008 at 7:00 am | In Just For Fun | Leave a Comment
The nightly news has been reporting world wide rice shortages. There have been riots in Haiti because of a lack of food.
The country of Vietnam , one of the world’s top rice producers, recently announced it was cutting off exports of rice, preferring instead to keep all the rice it grows inside its own boundaries to feed its own people.
Closer to home, just this week Sam’s Club announced it was rationing the number of bags of rice that customers can buy – only four bags of rice per trip.
Even my local news crew got in on the story, interviewing the owners of popular Asian restaurants and asking whether or not the global rice shortage will affect their menu prices. Their answers – so far – were no.
So why all the fuss over some tiny grains of rice?
Well, a lot of people, the world over, count rice as a daily food staple. They relay on cheap and available rice so that they can continue to eat. If rice suddenly becomes scarce and expensive, then people will go hungry.
In fact, people are already going hungry. According to the United Nations, 25,000 people die every day from hunger. Most of these people are children.
And even though there is a rice shortage right now, there is still something you can do. You can play a really fun and addictive computer game.
The game is called Free Rice. Every time you answer a multiple-choice vocabulary question correctly, you earn grains of rice. The rice you earn gets donated to people who desperately need free rice in order to survive.
The site is supported by advertisers, which is how the site, which is operated by the United Nations World Food Program, is able to buy more rice to distribute.
Visit the site and give it a try. I dare you. It’s impossible to just answer one question. Before you know it, you’ll have passed 10 minutes on the site!
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