The Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids, Volume 3, will be released in July, just in time to provide some summer fun! School will be out, but imagination and curiosity won’t take a vacation with The Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids in hand. This edition’s 192 easy-to-read pages are filled with riveting stories, fascinating articles, engaging games, and interactive projects.
Sporting a vibrant, full-color design, The Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids shares the same informative yet quirky personality as its cherished parent publication, The Old Farmer’s Almanac. It also includes many of the topics Almanac readers love, including weather, astronomy, nature, animals, food, health, and amusements.
This highly anticipated brand-new edition of The Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids will be available throughout the United States for just $9.95 (and in Canada for CND $9.95) at retail stores and in the children’s section of bookstores.
Kids of all ages who have a thirst for knowledge and a hunger for trivia will love reading tidbits like these, found in some of The Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids feature articles:
Far-out facts. Really far out … about outer space:
- Betelgeuse (pronounced “Beetle juice”) is a red super-giant star that is 14,000 times brighter than the Sun and about 20 times as massive. If it were where the Sun is now, it would extend out past Jupiter.
- The International Space Station is scheduled to be completed in 2010. This solar-powered space laboratory is the length of a football field, and crews from 16 nations live on it for 6 months at a time to explore communications, health, biology, physics, technology and more.
Reuse, recycle, read all about it:
- Cars can run on used vegetable oil. Drivers who use this method refuel at restaurants instead of gas stations, so their vehicles can smell like fries, burgers, or Mexican or Chinese food on any given day, depending on where they stop!
- An orange peel takes 6 months to decompose, while a tin can takes 100 years.
- The Toronto Zoo estimates that its 5,000 animals produce enough poop to power all of the zoo’s electricity needs, with more to go around.
Where there are wild animals, there’s wild trivia:
- Anyone who challenges a wild turkey to a foot race should be prepared to lose. Wild turkeys can run at up to 30 miles per hour (but not for far) and fly at up to 55 miles per hour (but not for long).
- Gluttonous tiger sharks, the most dangerous of all species of fish, have been known to swallow bottles, bags of potatoes, coal, overcoats, a driver’s license, a cow’s hoof, the antlers of deer, and (burp) a chicken coop.
- Sea turtles and homing pigeons are born with small amounts of magnetite, which enables them to use Earth’s magnetic field to “stay on course” during long trips.
Read it, then eat it! Here are some food facts:
- There’s nothing vanilla about the cocoa bean, which is used to make shampoo, cosmetics, soap, lotion, and candles, and, of course, delicious chocolate treats. In 1969, the Apollo 11 astronauts brought packages of dehydrated, freeze-dried chocolate pudding to the Moon.
- The largest rectangular pizza, made in Iowa in 2005, measured 129 feet by 98 feet and contained 4,000 pounds of cheese and 700 pounds of tomato sauce!
- Worm crisp … is this food? Yes! There are over 1,400 species of edible insects in the world, and in many countries, they are common snacks. Worm crisp, chocolate-covered scorpions, crispy crickets, and ant lollipops are available year-round from a gourmet shop in London.
The interactive projects related to some feature articles will get creative juices flowing and encourage kids to have fun getting their hands dirty. This edition’s projects include using a magnet to see the iron in iron-fortified cereal, making a wind chime, growing a sunflower tower, and growing plants under glass.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids Web site, Almanac4kids.com, is a wonderful complement to the book. It features a free Activity Guide with more than 100 projects, games, and ideas that will provide endless entertainment and learning throughout the summer and the school year. With articles in the Almanac as inspiration, kids can comment online, as well as share ideas and photos, compare projects, send e-cards to friends and family, check out the Old Farmer’s Almanac’s Web cams, submit ideas for stories, and much more.
The Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids is one of several publications produced by Yankee Publishing Inc. of Dublin, New Hampshire. Yankee’s family of products includes The Old Farmer’s Almanac, The All-Seasons Garden Guide, Blue Ribbon Recipes, Best Home Baking, The Old Farmer’s Almanac Everyday Cookbook, and several themed calendars both for 2009 and for 2010: Gardening, Country, and Weather Watcher’s (all for wall display); Every Day (in the page-per-day format); a spiral-bound Engagement calendar; a Weather Journal, and a Gardening Journal.
Folks who can not find The Old Farmer’s Almanac for Kids, Volume 3, in retail stores or in the children’s section of bookstores can order individual copies at Almanac.com or by calling 800-223-3166.
EDITOR’S NOTE: If you’d like more information, a cover shot, or an interview with an editor, please contact Ginger Vaughan or Karina Miller at 206-842-8922.
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