Long before we celebrated Halloween, Celtic people in the British Isles honored the dead during Samhain (which we pronounce “SOW-ren”). Some scholars think that Samhain was a Celtic version of New Year’s Eve. It was a holiday filled with ritual. Folks believed that in late fall, the veil between the worlds of the living and the dead was at its very thinnest. To light their way at this dark time of year, they carved out vegetables, and popped glowing coals inside. A popular choice was the humble turnip, which they grew, cooked, and ate, of course. Why turnips, you may ask? Think! Pumpkins didn’t grow in Europe—they are a New World vegetable. In fact, an old drawing shows how Indians in Virginia grew pumpkins in their villages in the late 1500s. Why not give turnip carving a try? Order big ones at your farm market. When you first bring them home, they might be hard as rocks. Let them sit out in the open for several days until they soften up a bit. To carve yourself some examples of the original “jack-o-lantern,” grab the turnips, some tea lights, a small knife, and a pointy spoon. Hold the turnip root tip up. Use a marker to draw the circle for the lid. Then trace or draw eyes, nose, mouth—whatever you’d like. Now be sure there’s an adult to help you! Use the knife to carve around the circle. Remove the top of the turnip and set it aside. That’s your lid. Use the spoon to scoop out the turnip just like a pumpkin. Be sure to leave a nice thick wall. Then pierce the turnip with your knife and gently carve out the features. Pop the tea light inside. Find a dark spot. Have the grownup help you light the wick and… LET IT GLOW! Today, folks grow pumpkins in the Old World, so kids all over Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales carve jack-o-lanterns just like you do. Turnips are out….unless you want to feed the cows.
 Kerrie Hollihan's biography of Isaac Newton sheds light on a lot of ideas people thought were mysterious. If you liked the turnip activity, there are lots more in this book. Kerrie Hollihan is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through FieldTripZoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more.
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So what’s a knot garden? Knot gardens first caught my eye when I was a kid and visited Mount Vernon, the home of George Washington. When I later visited England, I saw how our first president had carried on a long-standing tradition. Knot gardens, edged with tight growing shrubs like boxwood, wound across the property of kings and queens and lords and ladies. Sometimes herbs or flowers were planted inside the rows of shrubs, which twist and turn to form shapes that look like fancy knots. England’s Queen Elizabeth I enjoyed strolling through such gardens with her ladies-in-waiting. Certainly the queen’s knot gardens were among the finest in her day. In Washington DC, we Americans have a knot garden inside our National Arboretum, an outdoor museum of plants and trees. Small evergreens form the knot. Visitors stop to sniff the fragrant herbs planted both inside and outside the knot of evergreens. It can take years to establish a knot garden, but you can create an updated version that will grow in just one summer. All it takes is a little space, a variety of marigold plants, a digging tool, a bit of water-soluble fertilizer, and regular care. Plan your garden to be three feet by three feet. Look at knot gardens online for clues and make a simple design. Marigolds come in many colors, sizes, and shapes. Think about how tall and wide they’ll grow. Do you want tall flowers in the corners? Now plant your plants. Carefully pop the flowers from their packs and transplant them into roomy holes so they’ll grow well. Plant the inside garden first. Then move to the outside. At first your garden might look skimpy, but in a few weeks it will fill in. Mix fertilizer with water in your watering can and give the little plants a good drink. Marigolds are heavy feeders needing regular watering and fertilizer. Every few days, stick your fingers in the dirt to check for moisture. When the soil’s getting dry, it’s time to water— early in the morning or late in the day. Check this blog for more details!   A knot garden at Mount Vernon. Library of Congress  National Herb Garden at the US National Arboretum  Kerrie Logan Hollihan's lively biography of one of England’s greatest monarchs includes a time line, online resources, and 21 activities to offer readers hands-on experiences with life in the Elizabethan Era. Kids can create costumes for the queen’s court, including a knight’s helmet, a neck ruff, and a cloak, play and sing a madrigal, create a 3-D map of an Elizabethan town, stitch a blackwork flower, design a family coat of arms, play a game of Nine Men’s Morris, grow a knot garden, and much more. Kerrie is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more. _______________________________ MLA 8 Citation Hollihan, Kerrie Logan. "Knot Gardens." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 17 May 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/Knot-Gardens. 
In spring 1665 a college student named Isaac Newton studied natural philosophy, what we call “science.” Back then, a good student could learn everything to know about the natural world. But plague, the Black Death, came to England. Cambridge University closed. Isaac went home to Woolsthorpe. For two years Isaac thought about his studies during four years at university. He’d always been thoughtful—not the best at games, making friends, or minding sheep. But everybody knew Isaac Newton liked to think. Folks told time by the sundial he’d drawn on a wall. Home at Woolsthorpe, Isaac’s learning about science and math bubbled up in his head like yeast rising in a loaf of bread. So... Newton unplugged. His mind roamed like that of an artist or composer. He was driven by the need to create—not paintings or symphonies, but questions. “Why do things always fall down?” “Why does the earth move around the sun? “Why doesn’t the moon fall onto the earth?” “Does everything ‘up there” work like things work ‘down here?’” Isaac Newton answered his questions with three science rules, Newton’s Laws of Motion. At Woolsthorpe, Newton grappled with the concept of moving objects. He worked out the math to find the area under curves. He called this math fluxions. Today we call this calculus, useful for launching rockets or tracking TV signals. Once back at Cambridge, Newton said nothing until he read someone else’s paper on fluxions. Newton published a better paper. Soon he was Cambridge’s top math professor. Isaac Newton wondered another twenty years. He played with prisms in a dark room and theorized that white light comprises the visible spectrum of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, and violet. He practiced alchemy and chemistry, looking for the legendary philosopher’s stone to turn base metals to gold. In 1687, Newton published our most important science book, the Principia. In the Principia, Newton showed how laws of gravity and motion work the same at great distances—far off in space, or in your classroom. We accept these ideas, but in 1687 many still had medieval beliefs that sun, moon, planets, and stars all traveled in their own crystal spheres. Yes, Newton wondered about A LOT:
 Sir Isaac Newton was an English mathematician, astronomer, theologian, author and physicist who is widely recognized as one of the most influential scientists of all time and a key figure in the scientific revolution. Based on a portrait by Godfrey Kneller, 1702, via Wikimedia Commons  Sir Isaac Newton's own first edition copy of his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica with his handwritten corrections for the twentieth edition. Photograph Andrew Dunn via Wikimedia Commons  Trinity College, the part of the University of Cambridge where Newton worked and lived. Library of Congress  This statue of the young Isaac Newton stands at the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. Look carefully around his feet for a hint on what he is wondering about. If you can’t figure it out, then read about Newton and gravity. Wikimedia Commons  Featuring 21 hands-on projects that explore the scientific concepts Isaac Newton developed, Kerrie Logan Hollihan's Isaac Newton and Physics for Kids paints a rich portrait of the brilliant and complex man and provides readers with a hands-on understanding of astronomy, physics, and mathematics. A time line, excerpts from Newton's own writings, online resources, and a reading list enhance this unique activity book. MLA 8 Citation Hollihan, Kerrie Logan. "Isaac Newton's Wonder Years." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 21 Feb. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ isaac-newtons-wonder years.  
Dr. Percy Julian was my neighbor in Oak Park, Illinois. I didn’t know the family who lived in the pretty home surrounded by an iron fence. But I heard the story, that the house was firebombed after they had bought it back in 1951. The Julian's were African-Americans coming to a white community. Later I learned more. Dr. Julian was someone who didn’t take no for an answer. He grew up in the segregated South going to black-only schools. He hoped to study plant chemistry, but no southern college would accept a Negro, so he moved on. He went to DePauw University in Indiana and helped pay tuition by waiting tables at a white fraternity. He graduated at the top of his class in 1920 and wanted to get his doctorate at Harvard. Harvard refused, because that would mean Julian could teach whites—and that was not allowed. Julian moved on. He went to Austria to earn his doctorate, and in that lab he studied chemicals in plants, especially beans. Many excellent medicines came from plant chemicals, but extracting them was often costly. Upon returning to DePauw to teach, Julian was able to synthesize a plant chemical called physostigmine. His discovery produced inexpensive medicine for patients with glaucoma, an eye disease causing blindness. But the Great Depression fell across America, and DePauw ran out of money to fund his research. Julian moved on. A Chicago paint company hired Julian as the first African-American to head a research lab in American industry. Julian had to travel for his work, and motels refused him a bed. One year he slept in his car 32 times, sometimes in the dead of winter. Julian and his coworkers developed inks and paper coatings, dog food and a product called Aero-Foam to extinguish fires on aircraft carriers. His team discovered many uses for soybeans, at that time viewed as food for cows and pigs. Most important, they synthesized “Substance S” from soybeans. This synthetic drug replaced wildly-expensive cortisone. Julian’s landmark achievement offered relief to kids suffering from the painful and disfiguring disease rheumatoid arthritis. Percy Julian worked all his days, always moving on to make life better. He built his own research business, volunteered at church, played the piano, and loved his family. He became a quiet hero to many, including me. I’m writing a book about Dr. Julian, which I hope you’ll see in print. For now, visit this site.  This Percy Julian stamp was issued in 1993 to commemorate Black History Month.  Kerrie Hollihan has already written about one great scientist, Sir Isaac Newton. You can read more about this book here. Kerrie Hollihan is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through Field Trip Zoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more. MLA 8 Citation Hollihan, Kerrie Logan. "Dr Percy Julian: Forgotten Genius." Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 13 Feb. 2018, www.nonfictionminute.org/ the-nonfiction-minute/dr-Percy-Julian-Forgotten-Genius.  
When I was a kid fifty years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt had a bad rap. We learned that way back in the 1900s, he banned Christmas trees from the White House. What a lousy father, I thought. Down through the years, the story went something like this: Across America in the early 1900s, huge forests were in danger of destruction from a lumbering practice called “clear-cutting.” Lots of newspapers and public leaders asked Americans to stop going to the woods to cut Christmas trees. Now when the Roosevelts and their six kids lived in the White House, they didn’t have a tree. Stockings and presents, but not a tree. So folks assumed that Roosevelt had outlawed Christmas trees, because he was a huge outdoorsman and conservationist. But, according to people who’ve done their history homework, that’s not the whole truth. It’s possible that First Lady Edith Roosevelt had six kids to think of and didn’t want the extra fuss of a Christmas tree. Christmas trees had become very popular ever since the old German tradition was picked up in the United States, but not everyone chose to have one. As it turned out, the Roosevelts did have at least one tree, courtesy of their eight-year-old son Archie. On Christmas morning 1902, Archie surprised his family. The president wrote about it in a letter that told of Christmas morning:
A magazine ran the story of Archie’s tree the next year. From then on, it picked up all sorts of embellishments, sort of like playing telephone at a birthday party. Today, the best explanation of the old story appears on a blog run by the Forest History Society. Visit their website. And for more cool facts about Christmas trees, check out the website of the folks who know, the College of Agriculture at the University of Illinois.  Roosevelt Family in 1903 with Quentin on the left, TR, Ted, Archie, Alice, Kermit, Edith, and Ethel. Credit: Library of Congress  Young Archie Roosevelt on his horse Algonquin. Credit: Library of Congress  The discovery of the tree in the seamstress's closet was a popular Christmas illustration for a story that ran in Ladies Home Journal. The story underscored the simplicity of the Roosevelt family’s Christmas decorations and the president’s conservation ethic.  Theodore Roosevelt for Kids brings to life this fascinating man, an American giant whose flaws were there for all the world to see. Twenty-one hands-on activities offer a useful glimpse at Roosevelt’s work and times. Readers will create a Native American toy, explore the effects of erosion, go on a modern big game hunt with a camera, and make felted teddy bears. The text includes a time line, online resources, and reading list for further study. And through it all, readers will appreciate how one man lived a “Bully!” life and made the word his very own. Kerrie Hollihan is a member of iNK's Authors on Call and is available for classroom programs through FieldTripZoom, a terrific technology that requires only a computer, wifi, and a webcam. Click here to find out more. MLA 8 Citation Hollihan, Kerrie Logan. "Did Theodore Roosevelt Ban Christmas Trees?" Nonfiction Minute, iNK Think Tank, 22 Dec. 2017, www.nonfictionminute.org/the-nonfiction-minute/ Did-Theodore-Roosevelt-Ban-Christmas-Trees. Accessed 22 Dec. 2017.  |
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