Fun Sheets: Science & Math for Curious Kids

My boys are 11 and 9, and they are enormously curious. The questions arrive at breakfast, at bedtime and, most of all, in the car, faster than anyone can answer them. So we keep a notebook in the car just to catch them. Why are strange quarks called strange? Why does thinking about pizza make you hungry? How does soap actually get you clean?

From the notebook to the printer

Each fun sheet starts as one of those questions. I make them with Claude, and each one ends up as a single printable page, or a short set when one page can't hold the answer. Quarks needed four pages: how quarks were found, why they come in “colors,” the particle zoo and the whole Standard Model.

Every sheet follows the same recipe. A big question across the top, a few cards of real science, then a spotlight on one star: the strange quark, Pavlov's drooling dogs. A Try it! box has a puzzle or an experiment you can do at the kitchen table, like the lemon test on the hunger sheet or the pepper trick on the soap sheet. The answers are printed upside down along the bottom of the page.

Jumping ahead to Algebra 1

My older son is in 6th grade, and he just jumped ahead to Algebra 1. New math brings a new wave of questions, so now every topic he has questions about gets its own fun sheet.

The first one is Sets!, a two-page set. The first page covers the two ways to write a set: list every element, or give the rule that decides who's in. It also covers proper versus improper subsets, and small surprises like why the empty set isn't the same as a set holding zero. The second page sorts every family of numbers, from the counting numbers out to the complex numbers, each family nested inside the next.

Free to print

The sheets are written for kids around 10 to 13, but any curious person is welcome. Every one is a free PDF sized for US Letter paper: download it, print it, and hand it to the curious kid in your car. New sheets get added as the notebook fills up.