Fairy Tale Physics
The Fairy Tale Physics series combines beautifully illustrated fairy tales with foundational physics concepts to create a whimsical educational adventure. For ages 10-12. They can be read in any order, and they’re now the bestselling children’s science books on Amazon!
Newton’s Laws: A Fairy Tale
Newton’s Laws: A Fairy Tale follows the story of Kip, the youngest of three sons who is gifted only a single apple with which to go into the world and make his fortune.
He encounters a mathematical wizard named Newton, whose arch-rival Leibnitz is attempting to take over the kingdom. The old king has recently passed away, and the law states that whoever is able to create three laws and make the whole kingdom follow those laws will become the next king. Newton has a clever plan to invent three laws that everyone already follows, and Kip offers to help him. Together they journey to the capital, discovering Newton’s three laws of motion along the way.
Newton’s Laws may seem simple, especially because we’ve all heard them already, but they’re more complicated than they seem, and most of us have incorrect intuitions about them. I wrote this book to help students build an intuitive foundation that corrects these misconceptions. (The biggest one is that objects require force to move – my free body diagram worksheet focuses on this, too.)
Concepts Introduced
Newton’s Three Laws
Free body diagrams
Types of Forces
Gravity
Friction
Tension
Normal Force
Electric and Magnetic Forces
Apparent Weight
Content
For Ages 10 - 12
83 pages
The 37-page fairy tale
A section at the end explaining the science behind the story
Another section diving into actual problem solving with math
Conceptual practice problems
Quantitative practice problems
Fluid Mechanics: A Fairy Tale
Queen Elise never knew about the bargain her father made in order to become king. Not until after his death did she learn that he did not fulfill his end of that bargain, and now the kingdom and everything Elise loves is in jeopardy.
Elise, however, is determined to set things right, and she sets off on a quest to save her husband and her kingdom.
Luckily, she meets wizards Bernoulli and Archimedes on the way, who give her fluid-mechanics-related gifts to help her on her quest!
Concepts Introduced
Buoyancy
Flow Rate
Archimedes’ Principle
Pressure
Bernoulli’s Law
Archimedes’ Screw
Content
For Ages 10 - 12
48 pages
29-page Fairy Tale
Short Non-Fiction Section Explaining the History and Science
Suggested Activities, Videos, and Phet Simulations
Light: A Fairy Tale
Prince John has recently been crowned king. He wants to be a good king, however he has spent most of his life reading about slaying dragons and rescuing princesses, and feels an enormous amount of pressure from the fourteen portraits of his illustrious forebears staring down at him from the walls of the throne room.
Luckily, a mysterious witch appears with a magical candle that might be the answer to all John’s problems…
In the candle are the ghosts of the most powerful light mages: Einstein, Snell, deBroglie, and Young. And together these famous physicists teach him about light and color, so that he can bring illumination to his kingdom.
Concepts Introduced
The speed of light
The wave nature of light
Wavelength
Frequency
Speed
Color
Reflection
Refraction
Snell’s Law
Diffraction
The double slit experiment
The deBroglie equation
Electromagnetic waves
The visual spectrum
Content
Ages 10 - 12
68 Pages
The 39-page Fairy Tale
Short Non-Fiction Section
8 Conceptual Questions + Answers
Suggested Accompanying YouTube videos and Phet Simulations
Gravity: A Fairy Tale
When Worry was born, her fairy godmother disappeared, leaving her unable to use magic in a castle filled with it. Her sister Hope, however, has a fairy godmother and is taken under the wing of the last Scholar Knight. But when Hope is captured by a dragon, Worry is determined to rescue her and uncover the long-lost secrets of the Scholar Knights, with only her scientific curiosity and a sea-fact-loving ghost cat named Kepler to guide her.
Concepts Introduced
Tides
Circles and Ellipses
Logic and Syllogisms
Gravitational Force
Freefall
Orbits
The history of our understanding of gravity, from Aristotle through Einstein
Content
Ages 10 - 12
206 Pages
Writing Prompts
Experiments to Try
Discussion Questions
Suggested Accompanying YouTube videos and Phet Simulations
Physics Fables
Quick conceptual introductions to some of the most fascinating ideas in physics! These are short stories that each introduce a single topic, explain it through a story, and then give fun hands-on activities or discussion questions. Great for introducing a topic in an engaging way.
The Wayfarer's Scepter: An Adventure in Magnetism FREE
Learn the basics of magnetism and magnetic fields. Make your own compass!
Clemmm and the Polar Coordinates
Learn how bees use polar coordinates to communicate.
Sakura and the Many-Layered Sea: A Tale of Density
Learn about density and buoyancy. Use your new knowledge to send messages to mermaids!
The Emperor Butterfly’s New Clothes
Explore the physics of animal perception.
The Tortoise, the Hare, and the Photon
Learn the basics of special relativity! Explore motion and speed.
The Complete Physics Fables
The Complete Physics Fables includes all the short stories listed above. It’s available in paperback on Amazon, too.
For ages 8 - 10.
Integrated Activities
Each story is paired with hands-on activities that bring the physics concepts to life:
Use density to send a mermaid a message in a bottle!
Observe polarized light like butterflies navigating the sky!
Race with friends to experience the strangeness of Special Relativity.
Included Stories
The Tortoise, the Hare, and the Photon: A Tale of Special Relativity
Sakura and the Many-Layered Sea: A Tale of Density
Clemmm and the Polar Coordinates
The Emperor Butterfly’s New Clothes: Animal Perception Science
The Wayfarer’s Scepter: An Adventure in Magnetism
Help your child build a strong foundation in science and a lifelong love for learning with Physics Fables.
Adventure Workbooks!
The best way to learn is through doing. In this series, I’m taking some abstract physics or math (or both!) concepts, creating a story that involves those concepts, and then crafting a series of fun, hands-on activities to go along with the story. For each of these activities, you can download the PDF version for free, and the story that goes along with it, or you can buy a printed spiral notebook version (I print through Lulu rather than Amazon specifically because I love spiral notebooks so much. Much easier to write in.)
Starlight Starship: An Interstellar Voyage of 3-D Shapes and the Inverse Square Law
More Soon!
I hope to make more of these soon - if you tried out the Starlight Starship Adventure, I’d love to hear what you thought!
Non-Fiction
I have a couple of non-fiction series on Amazon. My algebra series is a set of basic workbooks focused on building foundational skills. They’re especially focused on the small details I see most students have difficulty with. Electric Circuits is part of the Stick Figure Physics series, which is a series of short (math-filled) eBooks that explain physics topics with stick figures.
Math Notebooks
One thing I do with most of my students is coach them on how to take notes. Notes aren’t just a way to record information for later use; they’re a tool for processing information.
The note-taking process I teach involves writing down the major ideas and equations, while mostly just following along with the lecture, thinking about the concepts. That way you record the most important information, but you’re thinking about and engaging with the content, rather than just copying what’s written on the board.
For all my students, I want math to be an enjoyable experience. Part of that is picking a notebook that they love writing in. Especially for students with ADHD, having really detailed notes that they can refer back to can be really empowering.
I know there are tons of beautiful notebooks out there, but I wasn’t finding any that had all the features I wanted, so I worked with an illustrator to create these. I wanted them to be really beautiful in addition to encouraging good note-taking.
Here’s what makes them different than the typical spiral:
Numbered Pages
Table of Contents
Lined Paper and Graph Paper on Every Page
Space for Important Equations
Space for Questions
The Sometimes Science Newsletter
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Fantasy Novels
I also write fantasy novels! I write humorous, character-driven fantasy stories with a lot of speculative world building and magic systems, usually with awkward, anxious, or over-thinking protagonists.
