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Bright-Kids
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Vol. 5, No. 26 - June 30th, 2008
http://brightkids.wordpress.com
mailto: debi@simplemom.com
Copyright 2008 Deborah Taylor-Hough
ISSN: 1536-0466 All Rights Reserved
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Subscribe: join-bright-kids@hub.thedollarstretcher.com
***: leave-bright-kids@hub.thedollarstretcher.com
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IN THIS ISSUE:
-- "Dear Readers"
-- Quote-able
-- Traveling with Children in the Car
-- Science Experiment: Heartless Plants
-- Reader Tips
-- Assorted Information (resources, archives, etc.)
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< < O U R . S P O N S O R > >

Free "Financial Stewardship Activity Book" for Kids

The World tells us "he who dies with the most toys wins"
but the Bible lays down a very different formula for
"winning" both on earth and in the eternities.

The new Financial Stewardship Activity Book by KidsWealth
is an easy and fun way to teach your kids about giving and
sharing from a biblical perspective. Through the activities in
this 28 page booklet your children will become reflective,
learn to make good money choices, and shine in the glory
of giving.

You pay nothing to download the new 28 page Financial
Stewardship Activity Book at http://tinyurl.com/5ewuxj

________________________________

Dear Readers ...

For those of you in the Seattle, WA area, be sure to check
out a local production of Shakespeare in the Park ... coming
this summer to a city park near you.

The two plays performed for free in parks throughout Seattle
this summer are: Hamlet and Twelfth Night.

For complete info, go to: http://www.greenstage.org/

And if you're not in the Seattle area, perhaps your local
community has free theater and other entertainment in your
local parks. Your local city's website will probably have
details.

Simply Yours,

--Debi
(Deborah Taylor-Hough)
Editor, Bright-Kids Email Newsletter
--Author of the popular 'Frozen Assets' cookbook series, 'A Simple
Choice,' and 'Frugal Living For Dummies(r)'
--Editor, Simple Times and Bright-Kids email newsletters

http://brightkids.wordpress.com
http://thesimplemom.wordpress.com
http://snurl.com/DebiTupperware
http://dsimple.wordpress.com
http://whiteriverpres.org

________________________________

QUOTABLE

"The best way to keep children home is to make the home
atmosphere pleasant -- and let the air out of the tires."

--Dorothy Parker

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TRAVELING WITH CHILDREN IN THE CAR
by Shari Steelsmith
Copyright Parenting Press
Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
http://www.ParentingPress.com


It's summertime and many of us are loading up the car with
kids, dogs, and luggage and heading off to vacation places. A
long car trip with young children is not something to undertake
lightly. With adequate planning, however, it can go off surprisingly
well. I have experience with both horrendous car trips and pretty
pleasant ones.

When my own children were small, we would travel via truck
and camper, once a month from southern California, where we
lived at the time, to central Arizona. It was seven hours, each
way. Some trips went better than others. I thought I'd share a
few things that helped.

Punctuate the trip with stops the kids can look forward to or
anticipate. For example, about halfway to our destination, we
stopped for gas at a place that sold ice cream -- it was marked
by a large red heart on its sign. My kids would eagerly look for
"the heart store." Later in the trip, they looked for a small
convenience store (marked by a dancing burro on its sign)
where we’d buy a cool drink.

My friend, who travels to another state a couple times a year
to visit her parents, tells how her boys (ages 5, 3, and 1) look
forward to a particular McDonalds for a lunch stop and a romp
in the playspace. The next thing they look forward to is stopping
for the night at a motel with a pool. The next day the big lure is
Grandma's house. She says the boys cope so much better
when they have these fun stops to anticipate and sort of mark
the time by.

Boredom with young children. Although it pains me to admit it
(being an anti-TV person) that the hands-down, best thing that
ever worked to keep young children entertained in the car is a
small TV/VCR/DVD unit.

Here are some other boredom busters we found useful in the car:

--Books on tape/cd. If your child is prone to carsickness, reading
a book is a risky idea. Try a book on tape instead. The little tape
players and earphones are very inexpensive.

--Play Dough or Silly Putty (depends on how worried you are
about your car's upholstery, but something to play with in your
hands is quite diverting to many young children -- and it can be
very useful for the child who gets carsick and can't look at books
or draw).

--Small toys like animal figures, superheros, little dolls.

--A Magna-Doodle toy (you can get them small) where the child
can draw and erase and never lose the attached pen. Again,
use drawing activities only if motion sickness isn't a problem.

--Safety. If you have a child who strenuously objects to being in
a car seat, I sympathize. You may decide not to go anywhere
at all and I wouldn't blame you. This is a stage many toddlers
go through and it usually lasts a couple months. If you must go,
then anytime you buckle in the child, you can expect a struggle.

Elizabeth Crary, author of '365 Wacky, Wonderful Ways to Get
Your Children to Do What You Want', recommends a special car
toy that the child really wants and can only have once he/she is
buckled in and not fussing. Offering his favorite kid tunes on the
radio may also work.

Discipline. If you're adequately prepared for a car trip, this will
lessen the discipline problems you experience. Bored, crabby
children will fight with each other to pass the time.

One consequence I recommend in my book 'Go to Your Room!'
is to require the misbehaving child to sit in the car (1 minute for
every year of age) after you get to your next stop (rest area,
gas station, motel, Grandma's house, whatever). Stay right
there beside the car so you're sure she's safe. It's a great
deterrent for the next time she's bored and tempted to pick
on her sibling. Another consequence is loss of a window
seat. (Use these consequences only with children ages three
and older.)

Bon Voyage!


FOR FURTHER INFORMATION:
--You'll find more practical tips you can use right now in the
helpful book, '365 Wacky, Wonderful Ways to Get Your Children
to Do What You Want' by Elizabeth Crary, M.S. To order, go
to: http://amazon.com/dp/0943990793/simplepleasuresp/

________________________________

< < O U R . S P O N S O R > >

Copycat Cookbook . com

Cook your favorite dishes from your favorite restaurants
right in your own kitchen!

You will save thousands of dollars per year by cooking just
one of these recipes each week rather than going out to eat!
Learn to cook the highly guarded secrets behind dishes from
Red Lobster
Applebee's
Chili's
Olive Garden
TGI Friday's
Outback Steakhouse
Starbucks

http://bkids.drecipes.hop.clickbank.net/

________________________________

SCIENCE EXPERIMENT: HEARTLESS PLANTS
Copyright Robert Krampf
Used with permission. All rights reserved.
http://krampf.com
FPLshows@aol.com


Have you ever wondered why plants need so much water? Some
of the flowers in our garden drink more every day than I do. To find
out why they need so much water, you will need:

- a well watered plant in a sunny area
- a gallon sized, clear, plastic bag
- a wire twist-tie or piece of string

Pick a plant that is in direct sun, as that will make things go faster.
Put the bag over the end of a branch, being sure that several leaves
are inside. Use the wire twist-tie to fasten the bag over the branch,
sealing it as tight as you can without damaging the plant. You don't
want air to be able to get in or out of the bag easily. Leave the bag
there for a while. Check on it every thirty minutes.

What did you notice? Soon, the bag had lots of tiny drops of water
on it. As more and more of these drops form, they will start to slide
down the side of the bag, collecting other drops and forming a small
puddle in the bottom of the bag. By the end of the day, you probably
had quite a bit of water. Where did all that water come from?

The water is coming from the leaves of the plant, through a process
called transpiration. The underside of the leaf has lots of tiny holes
called stomata. These holes let the plant take in carbon dioxide
and give off oxygen. They also let water get out. Some plants lose
more water than others, but a good sized tree can lose over 80 gallons
of water a day.

Isn't that awfully wasteful? Well, it does use a lot of water, but it
serves a purpose. To understand why plants need to lose all this
water, think about your body. You have a heart, which pumps blood
through your circulatory system. That blood carries oxygen and
nutrients to all the cells in your body. Plants don't have hearts.
Okay, so artichokes do, but an artichoke heart does not pump the
sap through the plant. How can a tree get water to move up from
the roots to the highest branches?

The answer is transpiration. As water evaporates from the leaves,
it is just like sucking on a drinking straw. Lowering the pressure
at the top of the tube lets air pressure push more water up from
the roots. As this water moves up, it carries nutrients with it. The
water evaporates, but the nutrients are left in the leaf, where they
are needed. Only about 1% of the water is actually used in the
process of photosynthesis. The rest of it goes out into the air.

All that water going into the air serves another purpose. It is a
major part of the water cycle. Almost twice as much water enters
the atmosphere through plants as evaporates from the surface of
all the oceans.

If you want to take this experiment another step, try putting bags
on different kinds of plants. Compare broad leafed trees with a tree
that has needles, like a pine. Control the variables or differences.
If one bag is in the sun and the other is in the shade, you won't
know whether the difference is because of the type of plant or the
amount of sun.


ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
--Robert Krampf travels the world providing fun science-related
programs to schools, home school groups, and other venues.
You can learn more about him at: http://krampf.com/bio.html

________________________________

READERS WRITE / READERS' TIPS
Submitted by Bright-Kids' readers.
Send your tips to Debi: dsimple@aol.com


== List of Summertime Activities for Kids ==
I’m 16 going on 17, and I edited your list down to about 80
things that I'd still be interested in doing. A few of them may
seem "childish" for my age, but still better than getting a
headache from being so bored. I changed a few slightly, but
they still seem good to me. I didn't even bother to change
"play dress up" on my list. I'm a teenage girl, of course I'm
going to like dressing up and looking pretty! Just mine's
more of a "try on different outfits and accessories" type of
dress up. A lot of these things on your list do work for teens,
like learning magic tricks can impress their friends, as well
as the learning a new instrument, making presents for friends
never goes out of style, and really, when you're a teen, there's
a lot of things you can do if you just realize you're not "too
good" for it because of your age.
--Kristen B.

You can find the article Kristen B. refers to online at:
http://snurl.com/kidsfun


We'd love to hear YOUR fun ideas to encourage kids to learn
something new or try something different! Or even just have
some good old-fashioned family fun. :-)
______________________________

READ-ALOUD BOOKS FOR FAMILIES:

http://snurl.com/reading4kids

Recommended books for children and families
(This is a great list to print out and hand to your kids'
grandparents for suggestions at gift-giving times!) :-)
_______________________________

A special thanks to Gary Foreman and the friendly folks at
The Dollar Stretcher for making this mailing list possible! :-)
http://www.stretcher.com/
_______________________________

< < B E . O U R . S P O N S O R > >

Would you like to place an ad in this newsletter? Contact
Andrea at marketing@stretcher.com Subject line: bright-kids
Discover the modest rates for reaching this targeted market.
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Feel free to forward this newsletter to your family and friends. :-)
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BRIGHT-KIDS ARCHIVES

For a list of most back issues of the Bright-Kids Email
Newsletter, click on the "Read Messages" button at
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DEBI'S RESOURCES:

Personal Blog: http://dsimple.wordpress.com
Nature Study Books: http://astore.amazon.com/naturestudy-20/
Frugality/Simplicity: http://thesimplemom.wordpress.com
Cooking Ahead: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/frozen-assets
Bright-Kids: http://brightkids.wordpress.com
Tupperware(r): http://my.tupperware.com/debihough
Personal Webpage: http://simplemom.com
My Church: http://whiteriverpres.org
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