Tag: inventions

Spaced-Out

The 4th to 10th of October celebrates World Space Week. In honour of this I‘m making my book – Sibo in Space – available on the website to read freely for the next two weeks. Visit  Sibo’s website and just click on the link.

Thought for Space week this year I’d share some awesome (and slightly gross) facts that you could wow your friends with, unless they have also read the paper!

Did you know that if you were in space… the skin would be peeling off your feet? Eergh! Because astronauts are not actually walking on their feet, the skin starts to soften and then flakes off. Here’s an even grosser fact – because there are no washing machines in space, the dudes wear their socks and jocks for longer than they usually would on earth! When they take their socks off, they have to do it very very gently otherwise those yucky dead skin cells would just float around all over  the place.

How’s this… one million earths would fit inside the sun.

If you are vertically challenged… you should go to space. In micro-gravity, because the spine is not being pushed down, it straightens out and a person can become a whole 5cm taller!

One always imagines that space is really far away, but in actual fact – if you could drive your car 100km upwards, you’d be in space in about an hour. Makes you wish your car could drive upwards hey!

The solar system is around 4.6 billion years old… but scientists reckon it will probably last another 500 million years still – so don’t worry – there is still time to do stuff.

Space is entirely silent.

One day on Venus is longer than an entire year on earth!

If metal touches in space it will bond together and permanently stick together.

One day on Mercury last around 59 days on earth!

If you ever stepped onto the moon… your footprints would remain there for ever. Why is that… because there is no weather on the moon. No wind or rain to blow or wash those footprints away.

Neutron stars can turn at a rate of around 600 rotations per second! Enough to make a person really dizzy!

If you fell into a black hole… you would stretch like spaghetti!

So … if you have a choice of going to school on Venus or Mercury – which would you choose? Duh! Mercury of course!

Sibo

Creative Holiday Doodles

Yay! It is holiday time again. If you are looking for something cool to do – try this out. It’s really easy and lots of fun. Plus for once you can do it on your own and you don’t need parental agents to supervise anything.

All you need are: wax crayons, paper and a toothpick.

Start out small first just to see how it works and then work your way up to doing something bigger.

Fold a piece of A4 paper into half and then into half again so you have four little sections. (You can even cut along the folded lines so that you have four pieces of paper.)  If you don’t have any paper you can always use the back of a used envelope or something similar.

Draw up a pattern in the middle of one of your bits of paper. You could draw a diamond within a diamond within a diamond or use circles or squares or flowers or anything you fancy.

Then colour-in the different sections in using nice bright wax colours. Make sure you colour in the whole section of paper. (Have a look at the picture provided.)

When you have finished, grab the black crayon and colour over your already coloured in pattern.

No! Don’t worry – I have not gone mad – it’s part of the process.

Once you have a nice big black blob your sneaky canvas is ready…

Use your toothpick, to doodle little pattern. Or draw a picture… or even better you could draw an Easter egg and decorate it with doodles.

Then you could cut that out and stick it on another piece of paper or cardboard to make a pretty Easter egg card for your parental agents or somebody else.  You could even email a picture to me and I’d put it on my website. I always love hearing from people.

Remember – the 7th April is also World Health Day. I don’t know about you but I hate being sick – so it’s important to stay healthy.  It’s not hard if you get enough exercise, plenty of sleep and you can always nibble on fruit, raisins or carrot sticks instead of sweets and chips if you are looking for a more healthy option for snacks.

Happy holiday’s people!

Sibo

Is it a Snat… or a Cake?

sibo-and-her-snat

Ginny was telling me the other day that when she was a kid she loved drawing monsters.

Monsters? I said. Whatever do you mean?

She reckoned she and her friends used to take a couple of pieces of paper and draw imaginary creatures. Scary ones, funny ones, tall ones, thin ones – you name it ones.

Then they would give those crazy critters names and make up stories about them.

Of course, I should add that Ginny grey up in Malawi a million years ago when there was no social media, internet and… it’s really hard to imagine this… but they did not even have a television. Sjoe!

No wonder they had to find stuff to occupy themselves.

But then the other day a friend of mine posted a picture of her cat on Facebook. She was holding the cats’ ears back, so it looked a bit like a snake.

leonies-cat

I started thinking about those monsters and wondered what it would look like if you drew cats’ ears on a snake. Or if you gave a cat a spitty tongue like a snake has. And what would you call your creature… a Snat? Or maybe a Cake?

I reckon that often we’re so busy going about our lives that we don’t use our imagination half as much as we could. And with with all these awesome animated movies it’s also a bit mind boggling and feels like a hard act to follow.

But actually we don’t have to follow anybody – we can do our own thing!

Plus we have cool tools. Apart from good old kokis or crayons and paper, we can also draw monsters on the computer.

You could even write your own little book with monster illustrations too!

So… who wants to accept the monster challenge?

Draw a monster – post it on Sibo’s Facebook page  and we’ll have a lucky draw where somebody can win some Sibo books. We’ll put the pictures on the website too.  If you want to make up a story about your monster – go for it!

You can draw them on paper and take a photo – or get your parental agent to take one. You can also draw one on the computer and post it or email it. There are no rules. You just have to draw a monster!

Have fun and be creative!

Sibo

sibo-thinking

Clever Ideas

Me - chuffed with myself!
Me – chuffed with myself!

Sometimes you read about a kid who has invented something useful and you wonder just how on earth they ever came up with such a clever idea that nobody had thought of before. Or maybe they came up with a better way of doing something that had already been done.

A few weeks ago I invented something that was useful and I realised that it is not actually as hard as one would think.

Those pesky ants kept getting into our cat’s bowl.  The poor cat did not fancy eating his pellets when they had wriggly little pepper tasting insects on them. (Ants do taste like pepper you know – pepper gets its flavour from a mild acid and ants produce acid – but I don’t recommend eating one to find out.)

We had to recycle pellets to the birds every single day. Worse – because he has a kidney problem – the pellets that he chomps are rather expensive.

Mum was all for just spraying poison on the walls so that the ants can’t even get to his dish but I thought that was a bit mean.

So I started thinking…

Ants don’t like water.  Well – they like it to drink but they don’t really like swimming in it. Right!

I took a dish and put some water in it and put the cats bowl on top of it.

Turned out the dish was a bit small and the ants made a little bridge of themselves and still got into the food.

So I took a bigger dish.  This did not work so well either because that cat of ours is a messy creature and he knocked half his pellets into the water. They swelled up and also got wasted. Even the birds did not like those squishy suckers.

Eventually I found a dish that was just the right size and ever since then we have hardly squandered a single pellet.

There was a process that I followed.

First I thought about the problem. Then I evaluated the situation to see how I could fix it. Then I tried different solutions to see which worked best.

I felt very chuffed because I had fixed the ant problem.  And it wasn’t even really hard either.

I discovered that they do sell cats bowls with a little moat around it for water – but still – I made a plan and it worked.

Be inventive!

Sibo