This afternoon, my kindergartener and I figured out that he weighs as much as 8,874 and 2/3 pennies.

We got started on this question while reading a recent Current Biology Quick Guide about predatory grasshopper mice, which the Quick Guide authors tell us weigh roughly eight pennies.

We shared our findings with my older two boys when they got home from school, and my 8-year-old wondered how many grasshopper mice it would take to balance my kindergartener on a scale. In case you're curious, the answer is a little more than 1,100 mice.

To figure all this out, we had to convert both pennies and pounds to ounces—we had the weight of the mice in pennies, my bathroom scale told us the weight of my son in pounds, and my kitchen scale reported the weight of the pennies in ounces. We had to multiply and divide. And we had to discuss fractions of pennies and mice (my eldest son pointed out that the first category is illegal and the second not very pleasant).

If you read the Quick Guide, you'll deduce that we hadn't even made it through the first paragraph before we took this mathematical—and intentional—detour.

It's a tactic I like to take when I come across an interesting article: before sharing the article with my kids, I first read it myself and identify several related topics or activities from jumping-off points within the text.

One of the coolest things about grasshopper mice is that, besides the fact that they're carnivorous and eat grasshoppers, they can also eat bark scorpions, whose venomous sting is, for most animals, painful at best and fatal at worst. Grasshopper mice, on the other hand, lick the wounded area and dig into their meal.

The Quick Guide nicely explains that, in an evolutionary twist, grasshopper mice have developed an ability to use the very toxin that kills other animals to block pain from the scorpion sting. But in order to comprehend how exactly this works, readers have to understand neurons and ion channels and how neurons communicate with one another. So, we took another detour.

We watched a YouTube video that uses M&M's to illustrate how neurons communicate, and we read The Nervous System, a graphic novel from the excellent series The Building Blocks of Science.1 Then we read about how electrochemical gradients spur the propagation of signals from one neuron to the next via action potentials on the Neuroscience for Kids website hosted at the University of Washington.



My kindergartener and his little sister check out how neurons relay messages through the body in The Nervous System. The book uses cartoons complete with your brain as the narrator to explain how neurons communicate.

Armed with all this information about how neurons relay the body's important messages, my fourth grader and I looked at an article that explained how the Quick Guide authors and their colleagues got to the bottom of grasshopper-mouse immunity to bark-scorpion stings (read the original research article in Science). We also watched a video in which grasshopper mice of different ages attacked bark scorpions.

These were all the planned detours; there were unplanned detours as well. As we were reading the article, we inevitably came across vocabulary words that merited further exploration. For example, we ended up at the Wikipedia page discussing stoats (it turns out stoats are weasels, which is a more familiar word). We discussed the meaning of an arms race in the military sense and then what that would mean in an evolutionary sense. We learned about exoskeletons, what it means to be an obligate carnivore, and the meaning of juvenile, opportunistic, and debilitating.

I should note here that although I read the Quick Guide word for word, with detours such as those described above, to my second and fourth graders, my kindergartener quickly lost interest. We looked at the pictures together another day while his brothers were still at school, and I summarized the text in more kid-friendly language. That was when we pulled eight pennies out of my purse to see just how heavy a grasshopper mouse really is.

I hope these techniques are fostering a love for learning in my kids. I also hope my kids are gaining critical-reading skills. Although it would be cumbersome to look up every word we don't know or delve into every possible side topic, good readers do periodically quiz themselves to make sure they've understood what they just read. Just how heavy is eight pennies? What does it mean if a grasshopper mouse is a ferocious killer on par with a stoat? And what in the world was that sentence with coevolution and arms race in it all about? Just because you can read the words doesn't mean you have understood what you read.

I hope my experiences will give you ideas for how to share cool science with the kids in your life. And if you don't happen to have any kids in your life just now, I encourage you at least to read about the fascinating grasshopper mouse. You could even take a detour or two.

1I discovered The Building Blocks of Science series at my library over the summer, when our librarian placed some of the titles from the physical sciences on display. My older boys (7 and 9 at the time) enjoyed reading them on their own, and my then 5-year-old liked listening to his brothers read them. When I checked out The Nervous System for our current study topic, my younger son asked to read the book again as soon as we had completed it—the series is that good.