Christmas Day!
Identify
the Christmas carol. (Synonyms confuse the familiar names.)
1. Inaudible Evening
2. Euphoria to the Entirety of Nations
3. Embellish the Corridors
4. Acoustic Device with Tinkling Sounds
5. The Dozen 24-Hour Periods of Yule
6. Travel This Way, Every Person of Trusting Belief
7. The Small Male Percussionist
8. Which Youngster Is Before Me?
9. Listen, the Spiritual Beings who Act as Messengers Vocalize Melodies
10. Far from Here, in a Trough
ANSWERS: 1.Silent Night 2.Joy to the World 3.Deck the Halls 4.Jingle Bells 5.The 12 Days of Christmas 6.Come, All Ye Faithful 7.The Little Drummer Boy 8.What Child Is This? 9.Hark, the Herald Angels Sing 10.Away in a Manger
Try to match the Christmas greeting with the language it is in:
Greetings:
1) Feliz Navidad
2) Joyeux Noel
3) Meli Kalikimaka
4) Froehliche Weihnachten
5) Salaam Kwa Siku Kuu
6) Glaedelig Jul
7) Buon Natale
Languages:
A) Hawaiian
B) Swedish
C) Spanish
D) Swahili
E) Italian
F) German
G) French
ANSWERS: 1.C 2.G 3.A 4.F 5.D 6.B 7.E
A great website about Christmas customs, including crafts and games, is here.
This website concentrates on Christmas traditions from around the world.
Happy Birthday, Gerard Peter Kuiper
This American astronomer was born on this day in 1905, in the Netherlands.
He was brought up in north Holland and went to university there as well, but
as soon as he got his doctorate, he moved to the United States, where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He became a U.S. citizen in 1937.
Kuiper made a number of interesting discoveries. He was the first to spot Uranus's moon Miranda and Neptune's moon Nereid, and he was first to discover a first moon in the solar system with an atmosphere (Saturn's moon Titan).
Kuiper is perhaps best remembered, however, for his suggestion that there was once a belt of small bodies beyond Neptune's orbit, leftovers from the formation of the solar system. Kuiper assumed that the huge gas giants would have gravitationally swept space clean of such objects by now—but there actually still are thous
ands and thousands of orbiting bodies beyond the planets. Every once in a while, something “jiggles” one of them, and it shoots toward the sun, becoming what we call a comet.
We now call that region of the solar system (the region beyond Neptune's orbit to about 55 Astronomical Units) the Kuiper belt. The Kuiper belt is similar to the asteroid belt that lies between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars. However, the Kuiper belt region is way huger, and the orbiting objects are made mostly of frozen ices rather than rock and metal.
Several of the bodies in the Kuiper belt are large enough to be classified as dwarf planets, including Pluto, Haumea, and Makemake. All the dwarf planets in this category are called “plutoids” in Pluto's honor—probably a consolation prize for Pluto being bumped out of the “planet” category!
What's circling which?Match each planet below with the objects that are orbiting around it:(Note that two planets have the same number of moons.)
1.Mercury -- 2.Venus -- 3.Earth -- 4.Mars -- 5.Jupiter --
6.Saturn -- 7.Uranus -- 8.Neptune
A. 2 tiny moons and no rings
B. 13+ moons and faint, fragmented rings
C. no moons or rings
D. 63+ moons and faint rings
E. 1 moon and no rings
F. 27+ cockeyed moons and rings
G. 200+ moons and a huge ring system
ANSWERS: 1.C 2.C 3.E 4.A 5.D 6.G 7.F 8.B
Here is solar system game. Read about comets here.
How about a Smack-Jupiter-with-a-Comet game? Find it here.
Also on this date...
In 1968 a man returned a library book to the University of Cincinnati library. The book was 145 years overdue, and the fine was more than $22,000! Of course, the fine was dropped!
Don't forget to return any overdue library books you have!
Magellan reaches (and names!) the Pacific Ocean (1520)
In 1519 Ferdinand Magellan, a Portuguese explorer, launched an expedition that ended up being the first to sail around the world. Although he himself was killed before the expedition returned to Spain in 1522 and 1525 (in two different ships), Magellan had in an earlier voyage sailed eastward from Europe as far as the Malay Peninsula; between the two voyages, he could be said to have sailed all around the world.
On this date in 1520, Magellan's was the first European expedition to reach the Pacific Ocean through straits at the southern tip of South America. Magellan named the Pacific Ocean “peaceful” because, when he first entered the waters from the treacherous straits, the ocean seemed still and calm. Magellan also lived long enough to be credited with leading the first European expedition to cross the Pacific. He died in the Philippines in 1521.
So...What's a “strait”?
A strait is a narrow channel of water that connects two larger bodies of water. Note that the entire idea of a strait is that ships can navigate through it, so a really shallow bit of water between two land masses would not be called a strait. Magellan did not, of course, have a map of much of the area he explored. When he carefully sailed through the Strait of Magellan—a journey that took almost a month—he was looking for a safe passage through unknown waters.
This map was created by Battista Agnese in 1544, probably based on the descriptions and maps made by survivors of Magellan's expedition. Notice that there is no clear indication of where the land masses end—because the explorers didn't know. Were the cliffs and lands they saw parts of continents, peninsulas, islands?
This modern map shows the reality of the situation. We are lucky enough to have explored the world pretty thoroughly, not just by land and sea, but also by air. We even have satellite images!
More maps: Looking at old maps of the Strait of Magellan, we can see a progression of knowledge gained from further exploration.
Match these famous straits to their descriptions:
1. Strait of Gibraltar
2. Bering Strait
3. Dire Straits
A. between Alaska and Siberia, connecting the Arctic and Pacific Oceans
B. between Spain and Africa, connecting the Atlantic and the Mediterranean
C. British rock band between stadium rock and punk rock, connecting the 70s to the 90s
ANSWERS: 1.B 2.A 3.C
Names...names...names...
All through history, names of things and creatures and places and even people change, which makes names very tricky things. One reason for this trickiness is that there are a lot of different languages in the world, so different peoples have different names for the same food, say, or animal.
Or ocean! We can be downright certain, when we hear that Ferdinand Magellan named the Pacific Ocean in 1520, that many, many other names for the same ocean existed, and continue to exist, in the many different native cultures and languages of the world. For example, Japanese used to call the Pacific Ocean Tokai, which means “East Sea” (because the Pacific borders the eastern coast of Japan, of course), and the Maori natives of New Zealand called it Te Moana-nui-a-Kiwa, or “the great sea of Kiwa.”
Magellan's name is attached to the strait that he used to cross from the Atlantic to the Pacific, but he himself gave it another name: All Saint's Straits. This name commemorated the fact that the expedition entered the strait on November 1, All Saints' Day.
Magellan's name is also given to a kind of penguin (the Magellanic Penguin) that lives in South America and to two small, irregular galaxies (the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds) that can be seen from the Southern Hemisphere. More recently, the Magellan probe mapped the planet Venus in the 1990s, and there is a GPS unit named Magellan.
Finally, we know Magellan (and honor him by naming things) by the English version of his name rather than his actual name. He was born Fernão de Magalhães, in Portugal, and when he renounced Portugal and became a Spaniard, he became Hernando de Magallanes.
Labor Thanksgiving Day in Japan
Today is Kinro kansha no hi, a day for honoring labor and production, and a day to give other people thanks.
This is a new, modern version of an old holiday commemorating the rice harvest—giving thanks for the harvest and acknowledging all the hard work that went into the crop. The new Labor Thanksgiving Day also emphasizes considering the environment, human rights, and peace. Children sometimes give drawings and gifts to kobans, or police stations.
Learn abo
ut Japan. At this website, you can see Japan through young eyes. And here is a way to take a sort of virtual tour of Japan.
Enjoy ric
e. Japanese recipes can be found here.
Props for cops. Take the time to thank police officers, fire fighters, and other people in your community who provide services. For example, you could make a nice thank you card and drop it off at the police or fire station.
Give thanks. Focus on noticing little things that people do for each other. Use the Japanese word for “thank you,” which is arigato. (A more formal “thank you,” which might be used when someone gives you a gift, is domo arigato. And a very informal “thanks” is domo.)
Match these other words for “thank you” to the languages they represent:
1.merci A. Arabic
2.danke B. Navajo
3.shukran C. Spanish
4.grazie D. Italian
5.aahehee E. French
6.spasibo F. German
7.gracias G. Russian
ANSWERS: 1-E 2-F 3-A 4-D 5-B 6-G 7-C
the Christmas carol. (Synonyms confuse the familiar names.) 
