‘The Science Of…’ is preparing a new exhibition called Spymaker which will examine surveillance and counter-surveillance in the near future (20 years from now). They have launched a call for participation from the public; you can send in sketches and short descriptions of surveillance-related products that you can imagine in use in 20 years time. They are seeking a broad range of submissions; if your kids are into spies, gadgets, or science, this might be a fun project to work on with them.

Selected concepts will be developed for the exhibition by product designers, and model makers will then produce prototypes based on the designs. ‘The Science Of…’ will pay £250 for each concept sketch and idea that is selected for development.

The exhibition will be opening at the Science Museum, London in February 2007, and will tour internationally for 5 years. You can find out more on ‘The Science of…” website.

The simplest of ideas are often the best. Stephanie from Little Birds put together this gas station and car wash with her kids, inspired by a project from Martha Stewart Kids (Spring/Winter 2003) over their Summer vacation.

“A trip to the dollar store for some baby bottle brushes, toothpicks, and matchboxes, along with a quick rummage through the recycling bin and we were good to go with this project.” - Stephanie, Little Birds

* Images reproduced with Stephanie’s permission.

The Martha Stewart Kids article has quite an elaborate set up…

with a nice line diagram to show you how to put it all together:

The 15th and 16th of September (this weekend coming!) is Clean up the World Weekend.

“Clean Up the World is a community based environmental program that inspires and empowers individuals and communities from every corner of the globe to clean up, fix up and conserve their environment……Clean Up the World encourages Members to organise a Clean Up event on or around Clean Up the World Weekend and also to think about ways of engaging the community in other long-term environmental initiatives. The needs of each community are different and Members’ campaign activities will vary.”

The Clean up the World website has lots of ideas and information about how you can become a free member, get involved, find or start a project and help clean up. Apart from this, perhaps the simplest thing you can do with your family is start at home - put in a compost bin, a worm farm, a recycling bin or work out your eco-footprint and think about ways of reducing it.

Kiddley reader Krista suggested a post on school lunches so here we go with part one!

Here in Australia we are heading into our September Holidays - which means I don’t have to run around like crazy packing a balanced school lunch before Kinder for the next few weeks. Hooray! But the first of September saw the launch of the Australian lunchbox website and online store LunchMatters, which has me leaping with excitement. Not only do they provide some wonderful lunchbox menu ideas, but they are selling Laptop Lunchboxes here without the ridiculous shipping costs. We bought a set from overseas a little while ago and are really impressed with it. Even when we are having lunch at home it makes eating fun for a pre-schooler.

So now I am thinking about lunchbox ideas again which is nice and timely for the beginning of the school year in other parts of the world.

For inspiration, you can’t go past the Vegan Lunch Box archives. Jennifer Schmoo is no longer making up daily school lunches but there is still plenty of interesting information on her site especially for vegan readers. Recently she has unearthed Bento TV - a quirky video podcast of daily lunch ideas that we are loving, and Dr Fuhrman’s “Packing A Lunch For School” and vegetarian lunch ideas from VegCooking.

Some flickr groups of interest - Laptop Lunchbox and Bento Boxes will keep your mouth watering.

Choice.com has a great interactive lunchbox. Drag and drop some typical lunchbox snacks and see how much sugar, fat and salt your kids are consuming.

** LunchMatters is kindly offering Kiddley readers from Australia, New Zealand and the Asia-Pacific region a special treat with every order for the month of September (2006). Just mention “Kiddley” in the message section at the end of the ordering process and you will receive a little gift (such as a cookie cutter, extra containers, forks, spoons and so on) with your parcel. Be sure to mention whether you are shopping for a girl, boy or adult so that you will get an appropriate gift. Thanks LunchMatters! **

Kiddley reader Aoife wrote in to let us know that she’s having a great time making some of the paper airplane designs found at paperairplanes.co.uk with her son. We checked it out along with a few other sites with paper plane designs and had a great time yesterday making and flying them. The wonderful thing about making paper airplanes is that they aren’t limited to a specific age bracket. Younger children can have a ball flying planes made by parents or older siblings, and older kids (and adults) can move on to more complex designs and learn about the mechanics of flights through experimentation. You can see by AJ’s plane design at the lower right that there is plenty of room for interpretation; it doesn’t get in the way of having fun.

Folding and flying the planes is also really only the start as far as activites are concerned; folded planes can be decorated with stickers and felt tip pens, and it’s also fun to use patterned paper for your planes or to decorate your planes before they’re folded.

If the patterns available on the web aren’t enough for you, Amazon also has a huge number of books available on paper planes; we can’t recommend any of them specifically, so let the reader reviews and ratings be your guide, or if you’ve found one that’s particularly good, let us know in the comments.