Books with author Michael A. DiSpezio

This delightfully illustrated introduction to finding your way home--or anywhere you want--is a must for growing confident kids. Filled with cool activities, quizzes, and wacky facts, every page takes a unique approach to maps and teaching basic geography to children. Build a compass; use the sun, sound or stars to get your bearings; and look at a "key to the highway." You'll always get where you're going!

Learning geography will always be fun with the special tricks you'll learn here. Starting from familiar territory (home, backyard, schoolyard) and moving outwards, this amusing, delightfully illustrated introduction to maps and more teaches street smarts to kids. Filled to the brim with fun games, cool activities, humorous quizzes, and wacky facts, every page turns basic geography into an adventure. Build a model of an early compass to understand navigation--then head out to test your skills. Use the sun, moon, and the stars to get your bearings. Look at a map similar to the one Columbus might have used when he set out to prove the world was round. Hit the road with "a key to the highway" that provides information on tolls, the number of lanes, and other details. Figure out which route goes where. All in all, you'll have a delightful trip--and end up just where you want to be!

These simple, fun experiments in magnetism and electricity will get kids all charged up. Test out a kitchen magnet and watch what it attracts; "light the light" with a fluorescent bulb and a piece of wool; "see" invisible magnetic fields and find the strongest part of the magnet; paste things together with static glue; make your TV screen snap, crackle, and pop; and transmit Morse code--with a station you build yourself! Almost all the materials are easy to find in the house or inexpensive to buy, and each experiment has a section that explains the underlying scientific principles--plus, they're all safe. It's absolutely electrifying! The author lives in North Falmouth, MA. 160 pages, 50 b/w illus., 6 x 9. NEW IN PAPERBACK

Whether there's a tropical heat wave or a chill in the air, whether there's rain, sleet, or snow, have some meteorological fun while learning about everything from hurricanes to sunny blue skies. How can you fly "above the weather?" What are the lowest and highest temperatures ever recorded on earth--and the solar system? How can you convert Celsius to Fahrenheit? What causes lightning and thunder? How do you read a weather map? And, along with these cool facts, try some really great experiments: with plastic cups, sand, water, and a thermometer, check and see whether the land or sea changes temperature faster. Or, get blown away with a homemade anemometer that measures wind speed. Create clouds in a jar. Plus--amazing trivia-like the day it rained frogs in Kansas City!

Be a scientist--and a magician--all at once! With just a little practice, you'll amaze people with fool-the-eye illusions that look like science experiments. Make a poker chip glow with a ghostlike blur. Shine a flashlight so it leaves a trail of light. Draw shark fins in a book, then watch them swim. Make an X disappear from a piece of paper. Turn green boxes red, then green again. Try all 50 tricks!

Kids can be both scientists and magicians—all at once! With just a little practice, and these 50 super experiments, they’ll amaze people with fool-the-eye illusions that also illustrate basic principles of visual perception. They’re amazingly cool, too, featuring tricks of motion; distortions of length and size; tilts, twists, and topsy-turvies that give a new slant on things; and fantastic flat-screen phantoms that play with illusions of depth.

Need a blue-ribbon science project? Here’s a treasure trove of super experiments to carry out: construct a simple circuit; exercise a little “Sun Power” with a solar cell; produce carbon dioxide with vinegar and baking soda; hatch some brine shrimp; stop food from spoiling; and lots more. Each project is carefully broken down to show what’s going on at every stage, and includes hints for impressing adults, inquiry ideas, and key terms. What makes this guide extra special, though, is that it also explains how to think like a scientist when choosing an experiment, gathering research, and assembling it all. Plus: advice on displaying the final results in awesome style, andon animal rights and wrongs, too. Try these and you’ll win.

Imagine you have a real Jurassic Park right around the block--wouldn't that be super? Well, these dinosaur activities, projects, and other fun things to do are the next best thing! Journey back to ancient times with a prehistoric quiz that sets the facts straight on whether dinos could fly, if the largest dinos dragged their tails on the ground, and whether brontosauruses ate only plants. Identify different dinosaurs by their silhouette. Flip through history with stick figure animations you make yourself. Find out about fossils-and where to search for them. Draw in the missing bones in a Triceratops' skeleton. The art's great, too: you'll see pictures of a fossilized tooth (actual size), an enlargement of an iguana, the image of an iguanodon, and more!