Cindy Blobaum - Explore the Ice Age!: With 25 Great Projects

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ISBN Softcover: 978-1-61930-581-6

ISBN Hardcover: 978-1-61930-577-9

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Imagine being alive around 12,000 years ago. Icy glaciers that were more than a mile tall inched their way across much of the earth. Giant hairy mammoths roamed the land. Fierce saber-toothed cats and short-faced bears prowled in search of food.

WORDS TO KNOW

glacier: a large body of ice moving slowly down a slope or valley or spreading outward on a land surface.

shelter: a place to live that protects a person from the weather.

Ice Age: a period of time when glaciers covered a large part of the earth.

Stone Age people worked together to find food, make shelters , invent tools, paint caves, and explore new places. Welcome to the end of the Ice Age , when the world was colder, many animals were bigger, and life was harder than it is today.

Even though humans were alive during the Ice Age, they couldnt take photos, write books, or make videos of their lives. They didnt have the right tools! As the earth warmed up and life changed, people forgot the way things used to be.

People made up stories to explain the strange things they found around them. People who lived in Greece found giant mammoth skulls with holes in the middle. Since they had never seen a mammoth, they said the skulls were from one-eyed monsters called cyclops.

People in Germany found skulls with big teeth and thought they were from dragons. In Denmark, old stories said huge, strange rocks found in the middle of fields were thrown there by giants. Other groups have said the huge rocks were dropped in fields by aliens or floods.

DID YOU KNOW?

Find something you dont recognize around your house or school. Make up a story to explain what you think it is before you ask someone else to identify it. How close is your guess?

WORDS TO KNOW

orbit: the path that Earth takes around the sun.

cycle: a repeated series of events.

Since the 1800s, scientists have been doing studies to learn more about the Ice Age and to explain the objects people have found. Scientists study the following things.

rock layers around the world

bones and frozen bodies that have been found

ancient art found in caves

Earths orbit around the sun

Many scientists believe that the world has been cycling in and out of ice ages for about 2.6 million years. There would be many cold years, followed by periods of warmer years. They believe this cycle of warming and cooling may have happened more than 100 times, with some cycles being longer and colder than others." This book focuses on the most recent ice age, which ended about 10,000 years ago.

A HUMAN-MADE GLACIER!

During the winter of 20142015, more than 110 inches of snow fell in the Boston, Massachusetts, area. The city scooped up a lot of the snow and made a huge pile 75 feet high. This was like a human-made glacier. The pile of snow didnt completely melt until July 14, 2015!

You can see a news program about this pile of snow.

KEYWORD PROMPTS

Boston snow melts

WORDS TO KNOW

equator: an imaginary line around the middle of the earth.

theory: an unproven idea that explains why something is the way it is.