Kids News - Social Studies for Kids

As we get ready to celebrate Columbus Day on October 14th, here is some food for thought. What if it was not Christopher Columbus, but Chinese Admiral Zheng He that discovered the new world almost seven decades before the Spanish explorer set foot on the island in the Bahamas that we now call San Salvador? That, is something that amateur British historian Gavin Menzies has been asserting for years and he now has new evidence to prove it....

Most people are grossed out by insects and believe them to be just a nuisance. However, a group of students from Montreal-based McGill University think of them as protein that can be used to feed millions of malnourished people worldwide, an idea so powerful that it won them the prestigious 2013 Hult Prize on September 23rd....

When luxury cruise liner Costa Concordia struck a rock in the Tyrrhenian Sea off the shore of Italy's Tuscan Archipelago and collapsed on its side on January 13th, 2012, salvage engineers knew that they had a nightmare on their hands because a rescue operation of a ship this size, had never been done before. To make matters worse, the liner lay right in the midst of the Pelagos Sanctuary, an environmentally protected area of the Mediterranean, which meant that even a small misstep could turn into a disaster....

When the Los Angeles branch of Bonhams Auctioneers placed a rare $4USD gold coin up for bidding they knew they had something special. However even the experts were stunned when on September 23rd, 2013, instead of the expected $1.5 million USD, the coin fetched $2.75 million USD, placing it amongst the 10 most valuable US coins sold at an auction....

Given the advances in technology and learning methodologies, it is a natural assumption that modern-day US students have it harder than those that were educated in 1912. However, the recent discovery of an eighth grade test paper set by educators at Kentucky's Bullitt County School District a century ago, seems to indicate that things were not as easy as one would have thought!...

Living in an era when airplanes can run on autopilot with no humans at helm, it is hard to imagine that there was once a time not too long ago, when pilots in the USA had to navigate their way across cities using rudimentary aviation maps and . . . ginormous arrows!...

Long before there was English, German, Hindi, Spanish, French and the myriad of other languages that we speak today, there was Proto-Indo European or what linguists affectionately call PIE. Believed to have been spoken sometime between 4,500 and 3,700 B.C. by our ancestors in Europe and Asia, it is the most researched of all ancient languages simply, because it is believed to be the root of many of the modern ones....

The fact that kids seem to have an inordinate amount of energy is indisputable. What if this energy could somehow be harnessed and turned into electricity? That was a question that Ben Markham, a retired Vice President of Engineering at ExxonMobil asked himself a few years ago. The result? Empower Playgrounds Inc., non-profit company that has transformed the lives of thousands of young kids in Ghana with a simple yet brilliant idea!...

If you have been paying any attention to the news for the past few weeks, you may have heard about the possibility of the US government 'shutting down.' At 12:01 am on October 1st, that possibility became a reality. So what led to this momentous event and how will it affect your day-to-day life? Read on . . ....