Ask the ASK Magazine

By: Maalik Khan
Submitted: 2007-11-22 15:52:10
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Ask investigates the world with past and present inventors, artists, and thinkers, and scientists. From the publishers of Click, Ask offers cartoons, contests, projects, Web experiments, games, and puzzles for kids ages 7 to 10. Ask is an informative, high quality magazine for children that engages them as readers and learners. Since each issue is devoted to a particular theme, my students gain indepth information about a variety of topics. They are fascinated by the attractive format -- which includes wonderful photographs, illustrations, and graphic aids that are appropriate for young readers.

My students have eagerly written letters to the editor and entered the bi-monthly contests. I highly recommend Ask as an excellent magazine for school libraries, classrooms, and homes. Ask Magazine is designed to teach elementary age children about science using art and arts and crafts. Each issue has a theme and that theme is adhered to fairly strongly throughout (everything but a single page of short "how things work" articles at the front and a page of scientific question and answer at the back fits the theme). Themes tend to be less general than the themes in other children's science magazines and often take a slightly different angle than you might expect.

Instead of an issue on the science of light, Ask published an issue on darkness. Other issues take a "how x works" approach; one of my favorite issues covers how our brain processes new information, or in simpler terms, how we learn. Each issue also has a cartoon that fits the theme. Although technically containing the same characters and part of an ongoing strip, I find strips tend to be independent and not linked in any real way to previous or subsequent installments. The artwork is somewhat dull and not terribly appealing, but some of the ideas and content are quite clever and make me laugh. For example, the cartoon in the issue on cars featured "grassoline" and showed a car that runs on grass. Despite the very real lack in the artwork, this cartoon was very effective. Not only was it funny, but it illustrated some engineering principles without getting technical and it also implied that alternate fuel methods were under development without getting into politics or heavy issues.

Some of the Cartoons are much lighter, though. The cartoon in the darkness issue showed some of the creatures you might imagine lurking about if you're afraid of the dark and the power went out. It didn't bring anything to the table other than a stab at entertainment (and, in my opinion, it failed there too). Ask is an informative, high quality magazine for children that engages them as readers and learners. Since each issue is devoted to a particular theme, my students gain indepth information about a variety of topics. They are fascinated by the attractive format which includes wonderful photographs, illustrations, and graphic aids that are appropriate for young readers. My students have eagerly written letters to the editor and entered the bi-monthly contests. I highly recommend Ask as an excellent magazine for school libraries, classrooms, and homes.Like all of the magazines from the folks that bring us Cricket and Spider, this is an attractive work, full of diverse types of stories and artwork. Unfortunately, however, too many of the children I know (my own included) find it uninteresting, perhaps due to the lack of recognizable characters or even the zing of advertising.

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