Have you heard of the Natural History Museum’s Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition? It’s a brilliant chance for young nature-lovers like you to show off your photography skills. Best of all? Kids can enter free!
This competition is all about celebrating the beauty and wonder of the natural world. When you take part, you’ll join people from all over the world who love capturing moments in nature, whether it’s animals playing, birds flying or tiny bugs doing their thing.
When you enter, your photos could be chosen to be part of an amazing exhibition at the Natural History Museum that people from all over the world come to see. Imagine your photo on display, inspiring others to care more about wildlife and the environment!
Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas won the Young Wildlife Photographer Of The Year – Grand Title 2024 award.
This photo is of fruiting bodies of slime mould and a tiny springtail. It was taken by Alexis Tinker-Tsavalas in Germany, and he was awarded Young Wildlife Photographer Of The Year – Grand Title 2024. Find out more about this incredible photograph here.
Taking pictures of our wonderful planet isn’t just fun – it also can also remind everyone of the beauty of nature, and why protecting it is so important.
So, if you love taking pictures and want to share what’s special about the world around you, grab a camera or phone, head outside, and capture something amazing. You might be the next young wildlife photography star!
Here’s your chance to win one of ten copies of The Science Museum Puzzle Book: Journey Into Space. Keep reading to tackle some of the intergalactic puzzles featured inside!
Plan a mission, train to be an astronaut, launch a rocket and discover what it’s like to live in space as you tackle the teasers in this brilliant puzzle book!
As well as over 100 space-themed puzzles, this book is stuffed with essential space facts and profiles of significant people and moments linked to space exploration.
Put your brain to the test with these puzzles, taken from Journey Into Space: A Science Museum Puzzle Book. You’ll find the competition below these puzzles.
We’ve got ten copies of this book to give away! Simply answer the question in the comments to be in with a chance.
Which person has travelled into space?
A Helen Sharman B Galileo Galilei C Arthur C. Clarke
The Science Museum Puzzle Book: Journey Into Space by The Science Museum is published by Seven Dials available in trade paperback and eBook on 7th November 2024. RRP £14.99.
Hoopla is a new magazine to help support the emotional wellbeing of children aged 5 to 10, full of fun activities, jokes and good news!
In a world where our children are growing up faster than ever before, where they face the pull of screen time, societal pressures to excel at school, to fit in with their peers, to be a certain body shape and to look a certain way, it’s easy to see how kids can sometimes feel overwhelmed.
It’s no wonder an ever-growing proportion of young children are facing mental health problems from an early age.
A magazine to help keep children carefree, playful and happy…
Hoopla magazine gives kids aged 5 to 10 a breathing space. A space to be who they want to be, to explore new ideas, to challenge their brains, and to try fun activities that foster happiness and wellbeing.
Hoopla is a 36-page magazine, packed full of fun ideas for off-screen activities to try at home, along with exciting articles to stimulate children’s expanding brains. Hoopla helps to keep kids happy, playful and curious. It’s a real physical magazine that arrives especially for them through the letterbox each month – a dose of happiness delivered straight into their hands each month!
Hoopla is the happy magazine for all children who want to have fun! 😁
What’s inside Hoopla magazine?
There’ll be a new topic each month and each edition will feature sections on art, nature, science and cooking, as well as emotions and critical thinking.
The first edition of Hoopla is all about having fun! It will get kids thinking… What does it mean to have fun? Would it be enjoyable to have fun all the time? How do you and your family have fun? Plus, there’ll be loads of fun activities to try at home!
Future editions will cover a wide range of topics, from dinosaurs and detectives to ancient Egypt.
Ideas for fresh-air adventures that encourage kids to get outside
The 36 pages will be packed full of ideas to keep kids happily engaged, such as outdoor activities, art projects and fun science experiments.
Kids will discover famous artists and get to try a related art project each month
There’ll be a good news section as well as journalling pages to encourage boys and girls to write or draw their thoughts, feelings and experiences. There’ll also be stories, puzzles, jokes and riddles to keep young minds challenged and active.
Children are encouraged to express their thoughts and feelings
Each magazine is lovingly illustrated by awesome illustrator Clive Goodyer with fun-loving characters that help to bring the magazine to life.
Magazine characters, clockwise from top left: Jem, Callie, Tanj and Whirl
Happy, healthy minds
Dr Naira Wilson, a clinical psychologist specialising in childhood mental health and author of children’s books supporting emotional wellbeing, will be Hoopla’s expert adviser. Hoopla will promote ideas that engage children in activities that support their wellbeing, without being prescriptive or pushy.
Beam a ray of happiness to your child each month with Hoopla magazine!
Helping others
We’re committed to helping as many children as possible, which is why we’ll be supporting children’s charity ‘Place2Be’. This well-established charity partners with schools all over the country to supply trained councillors for one-to-one and group counselling so that children of all ages have someone to turn to.
So a subscription to Hoopla doesn’t just support your child’s happiness, it also supports the wellbeing of thousands more children.
Who are we?
I’m Jenny Inglis, a mother of three and for a time I was fostered as a child. I have also had experience of being a foster parent too. I am therefore personally very aware of the experiences of childhood mental health struggles and the importance of children’s wellbeing and happiness. It is for those reasons that I’m hoping to launch a new happy magazine for children. ‘Hoopla’ will help to promote self-acceptance, positive mental attitudes and enjoyment of all aspects of childhood life.
For the last nine years I’ve been running an equally awesome magazine for kids called Whizz Pop Bang – it’s an award-winning magazine that brings science to life for girls and boys aged 6 to 12. I started Whizz Pop Bang from a Kickstarter campaign in 2015 and it’s been a roaring success ever since!
With the help of my fabulous team of Whizz Pop Bang writers, illustrators, designers and customer service super stars, we’re ridiculously excited to be bringing this second magazine to life!
Thank you so much for your support in helping to make Hoopla magazine a reality!
Build Your Own’s range of super-cool, eco-friendly kits are a fantastic way to bring STEM learning to life in a way that kids can get stuck into. Budding engineers can build a honey bee, ladybird, stag beetle and dragonfly with these inspiring mini kits.
Whizz Pop Bang is the awesomely amazing science magazine for kids, and our lucky winner will receive a three month subscription! Every edition is packed with experiments, activities, jokes, inspiring stories and more. It’s guaranteed to be a hit with every small dinosaur expert, keen kitchen chemist or generally curious child.
To enter, simply answer this question correctly in a comment
Woohoo! We are so proud to have reached our 100th edition of Whizz Pop Bang! To celebrate this milestone edition, we are giving away an entire year’s subscription to Whizz Pop Bang and some of our awesome science books. Will you be our lucky winner?
The winner of this epic bundle of science goodies will look forward to a brand new edition of Whizz Pop Bang rocketing through their letterbox every month plus a Whizz Pop Bang Science Puzzle Book and Scrap Book (with stickers!).
To be in for a chance of winning, simply answer this question in the comments:
What’s the closest planet to the Sun in our solar system?
A) Earth
B) Venus
C) Mercury
This competition closes at midnight on 30th November 2023 and is open to UK residents only. For full terms and conditions visit whizzpopbang.com/terms-and-conditions
Professor Lynne Boddy is a woodland fungi expert at Cardiff University and she told us all about her amazing career in Whizz Pop Bang 99: Fantastic Fungi.
Lynne has written a beautiful book, Humungous Fungus, an exploration of all things fungi which will amaze young readers, and open their eyes to the fungi thriving all around them and we’ve got four copies to give away!
Simply answer this question in the comments for your chance to win a book.
Which one is a part of a mushroom? a) Gill b) Hill c) Spill
Good luck!
This competition closes at midnight on 31st October 2023 and is open for UK residents only. For full terms and conditions visit whizzpopbang.com/terms
Do you or your children have magazine subscriptions that you would like to store neatly? The Whizz Pop Bang magazine binder has been carefully developed to make looking after your precious magazine collection simple!
Our brief was straightforward: to find a way for our readers to make sure that their magazines would stay as good as new for a long time. Lots of binders use metal rings, which means punching holes in treasured editions, and that just didn’t feel right. Instead, our colourful binders use a traditional, non-damaging cord system.
This awesome magazine binder is perfect for storing a whole year’s worth of Whizz Pop Bang magazines. Inside the binder, you’ll find 12 Cordex strings (lengths of super-strong cord). Open your magazine to the middle pages, then slide it under one of the 12 strings. In a couple of minutes, you can slot 12 magazines into the binder in the order of your choice. Once secured, you can flick through your collection with ease – as if it was one giant book!
Storing your Whizz Pop Bang subscription in one of our robust binders is the ideal way to preserve it for many years, allowing readers to refer back to older issues when they suddenly become relevant again as new school topics are introduced and new personal interests are discovered.
Whizz Pop Bang is the award-winning science magazine that brings science to life for girls and boys aged six to twelve (and their parents too)!
Discover how easy it is to enjoy science at home with Whizz Pop Bang magazine. Spark your child’s imagination with lab-loads of hands-on experiments, the latest science news, tantalising puzzles and amazing facts.
Subscribe today to start your child’s adventures in discovery and to inspire the scientists of the future!
Carl Sagan was an astronomer, planetary scientist, cosmologist, astrophysicist, professor and science communicator who was fascinated by extra-terrestrial life. You can read about him in Whizz Pop Bang 98: Aliens!
Carl was involved in American space exploration since it began in the 1950s. He put together messages that were sent into outer space in the 1970s on the Voyager Golden Record.
By NASA – Great Images in NASA Description, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=6455682
Copies of the Golden Record were carried by Voyager I and Voyager II. They contained:
Messages in 55 ancient and modern languages
Sounds from Earth
Images of humans and Earth
By NASA/JPL – The Sounds of Earth Record Cover, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=137443
The discs contained diagrams that explain where Earth is and how to play the record. Scientists spent a long time working out how to communicate these messages to aliens!
English (this was recorded by Nick Sagan, Carl’s son, when he was six!)Akkadian (an ancient language used in Mesopotamia about 6,000 years ago) “May all be very well.”Arabic “Greetings to our friends in the stars. We wish that we will meet you someday.”Cantonese “Hi. How are you? Wish you peace, health and happiness.”Hebrew “Peace”Korean “How are you?”Nguni “We greet you, great ones. We wish you longevity”Polish “Welcome, creatures from beyond the outer world.”Rajastani “Hello to everyone. We are happy here and you be happy there.”Spanish “Hello and greetings to all.”Welsh “Good health to you now and forever.”
Music
Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor
New Guinea, men’s house song, recorded by Robert MacLennan
Mexico, “El Cascabel,” performed by Lorenzo Barcelata and the Mariachi México
“Johnny B. Goode,” written and performed by Chuck Berry
Georgian S.S.R., chorus, “Tchakrulo” collected by Radio Moscow
Peru, wedding song, recorded by John Cohen
Images
We can’t include the photographs and diagrams included on the Golden Record because of copyright but you can see some of them here. These show some of the same subjects that featured on it.
If you want to find out more about fantastic scientists like Carl Sagan, subscribe to Whizz Pop Bang, the awesomely amazing science magazine for kids! Learn about inspirational scientists of the past and present every issue – our readers are the in credible scientists of the future!
Team Whizz Pop Bang spent a wild weekend meeting hundreds of scientists-in-training at Just So Festival 2023. Thank you so much to Just So Festival for having us back again – we absolutely love being a part of this incredible event.
This year, we brought Jonathan Scott from the European Space Agency (ESA) along to share his amazing knowledge of staying fit and healthy in space. Jon works in the Space Medicine Team at ESA and he used his expert skills to run an Astronaut Training Camp.
Jon brought a replica space suit along for Whizz Pop Bang fans to try on!
We were overwhelmed with the turn out for Jon’s talk and it was fantastic to see so many budding astronauts! A HUGE thank you to Jon, and to all of you who came and joined in the fun. We hope you picked up a thing or two about how astronauts stay fit and healthy on board the International Space Station.
We also ran The Whizz Pop Bang Discovery Den, where young scientists could explore their five senses in some super-fun hands-on experiments.
Children were invited to visit us in ‘The Future’ area in the woodland at Just So Festival and try five different activities linked to the senses.
It’s not long until the fantastic Just So Festival kicks off – it’s running at Rode Hall, Cheshire on 18th – 20th August 2023. It’s an incredible outdoor adventure for families from bumps to great grandparents, and Whizz Pop Bang are so excited to be a part of the fun that’s in store!
The Whizz Pop Bang team are huge fans of this magical festival, and once again, we’re bringing a sprinkle of science to the programme!
Head to Astronaut Training Camp with ESA’s Jonathan Scott in collaboration with Whizz Pop Bang, the awesome science magazine for kids
Ever dreamed of becoming an astronaut when you grow up? Roll up for an action-packed talk by Jonathan Scott from the European Space Agency to discover the skills and techniques needed to stay healthy on board the International Space Station. Test out some astronaut training exercises, feel how gravity affects us here on Earth and check out a replica spacesuit!
Discovery Den by Whizz Pop Bang, the awesome science magazine for kids
Come along to an exploration of your senses at this hands-on discovery session run by the makers of the most awesomely science magazine for kids, Whizz Pop Bang! You won’t believe your eyes, ears, noses, fingers or tongues in this interactive session full of weird and wonderful sensations! Perfect for children aged 6 to 12.
Find out more about the festival at justsofestival.org.uk, where the line up has been announced! Discover a celestial celebration of the planets in The Observatory, step out of 2023 and into the future at The Future stage, hear stories galore in the Spellbound Forest, and so much enchanted adventure throughout the site. There’s something for every member of the family!
Whizz Pop Bang is an awesomely amazing monthly science magazine that brings science to life for children aged six to twelve (and their parents too)! There’s lab-loads of hands-on experiments, mind-boggling facts, puzzles, news and fun packed into each month’s magazine. Whizz Pop Bang sparks imaginations and inspires the scientists of the future from the moment it comes bursting through their letterbox. Subscribe today at whizzpopbang.com!
If you’re not lucky enough to be going to Just So Festival this year, but want to have heaps of fun with science, browse back issues in our shop now!
