Tormenting your kids with science

One of the stranger ways my parents (both historians) exposed me to science was the weird and wonderful Singing Science records. These albums from the '50s and '60s cover many facets of science--nature, physics, outer space, weather, etc.--and are pitched at perhaps 4- to 9-year olds.

Even if you're not in that age bracket, you might enjoy listening to the MP3s that are online, these records being long out of production. They're best appreciated if you have the goofy sense of humor that responds to rhyme schemes like:

There is no disputin',
There is no refutin',
We're all indebted
To Sir Isaac Newton.

or if you can match their enthusiasm for science and jaunty tunes:

What does the glass of a greenhouse do?
It doesn't let the long heat rays pass through
Trapped by the glass, they bounce back and forth,
Re-radiated and re-absorbed.

Why Does the Sun Shine? was covered, many decades later, by They Might Be Giants:

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas.
A gigantic nuclear furnace,
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees.

I remember taking a science test in perhaps 7th grade and humming this tune to myself to sort out whether hydrogen turned to helium or vice versa.

Similarly, the word friction was firmly in my vocabulary--it's "the rub-a-dub-dub rub-a-dub/ Of objects that are moving/ And the rub-a-dub of contact is friction at work"--from a tender age.

The Jekyll grandparents owned these records, and as a result, during Jekyll family get-togethers, the entire clan sometimes bursts into "A shooting star is not a star, is not a star at all/ A shooting star's a meteor that's headed for a fall." Really, it's an odd family.

Of course, the philosophers of science among you won't be pleased to hear, "A scientific fact/ It has to be correct/ It has to be exact," but your children are unlikely to mind.

Anyhow, the Space songs are the best, in part because of the excited speculation about whether we'll ever go to the moon. Go give them a listen.