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Field Trips of Dreams: Magic School Bus Science Kits Bring Beloved Series to Life
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Over 20 years ago, Scholastic Vice President and Senior Editorial Director Craig Walker had a brilliant idea. Why not incorporate elementary science curriculum into entertaining stories?
"I remembered as a child loving to go on field trips," Walker says (as quoted in a Publishers Weekly article from 2006). "So I thought about doing books about kids going on field trips to places they really couldn't: through a water system, to the bottom of the ocean, inside the earth. And I remembered an eccentric second-grade teacher in my school who everyone thought was the best. She brought everything imaginable into her classroom -- even a teepee -- and had every corner, ledge and windowsill filled with things. So that is where Ms. Frizzle came from."
When Walker paired author Joanna Cole, known both for science and humor writing, with illustrator Bruce Degen, The Magic School Bus series was born. In the decades that followed, the franchise grew to include over 130 picture books and chapter books as well as an animated television series produced with support from the National Science Foundation.
With an unflappable demeanor and a flamboyant science-inspired fashion sense, Ms. Frizzle takes her curious students on field trips in the Magic School Bus that surpass their wildest dreams. They've journeyed inside the human body, explored the solar system, ventured beneath the ocean and gotten way too close to active volcanoes. In one story, they nearly became tasty treats for a rabbit, a snake and a whale as part of a lesson on food chains. The characters are likeable and relatable, and the adventures combine just the right amount of science, thrills, humor and drama.
But while the lucky students in Ms. Frizzle's class get to "take chances, make mistakes, and get messy" (something "The Frizz" regularly encourages), readers and viewers weren't always as fortunate. Sure the stories and television shows are engaging, but there needed to be a way to invite the audience in to experience the science first hand.
Enter Young Scientists Club founder Esther Novis, who began partnering with Scholastic to create Magic School Bus science kits a few years back.
"I was at Toy Fair exhibiting and they saw our booth and they really felt our products were in line with what their brand was doing," says Novis. "The way Ms. Frizzle teaches, hands on, that's really how all of our kits are developed as well."
(A Harvard-trained biologist and mother of five, Novis tests all her kits on real kids who attend her science camps each year. "Generally the kits need very few changes by the time we get to camp," she notes, "but sometimes they do something completely different than I anticipated because they're kids and I can still make those changes before they go to mass production.")
Scholastic "felt like what we were doing was in line with what they wanted for their brand," she adds. "They didn't want just a big commercial licensing deal. They wanted it to be true science."
The line began with three kits, Journey into the Human Body, World of Germs, and Mysteries of Rainbows, and has since expanded to seven. (Novis currently is working on new Magic School Bus kits, too.) While the kits don't necessarily correlate to a particular book in the series (many do, but not all), they complement the books and the television program by incorporating Ms. Frizzle and her students into the instruction booklets and following the same "science is fun when you dig in with both hands" principles on which the franchise is built.
"The instruction booklets are set up very similarly to the books in that Ms. Frizzle and the bus and the students take the children through all the experiments," says Novis. "We use similar language to what they use in the books as well."
The Magic School Bus kits have won numerous awards from respected organizations including The National Parenting Center, Parents' Choice, Creative Child Magazine, iParenting Media, Mr. Dad and more. Novis attributes the success of the kits and the onslaught of awards to the company's unique approach to teaching children science.
"It's all hands on," she says. "The booklets are fun but they're also informative, and they're easy for the parents to use as well as the children." Because their target audience is children 5 years old and up, parental supervision is often required, but Novis makes sure all the instructions are easy to follow and all the materials you need are included in the kits. That makes parents especially happy.
"There are lots of activities in each kit and the information is age appropriate," she continues. "We don't give them so much information that they'll get confused and frustrated. ...We give them enough that they're going to be able to retain it and relate to it."
The collaboration between Scholastic and Young Scientists Club appears to be an ideal match. "People really love reading the books," says Novis, "and these kits are a great way to make the books and the videos and the shows come alive in their own houses."
Home > Resources for our Science Kits > Articles on Science Learning and Science Kits > Field Trips of Dreams: Magic School Bus Science Kits Bring Beloved Series to Life
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