Indholdsfortegnelse for Issue 248 i National Geographic Kids (UK)

Way before they were portrayed as heroes in the Harry Potter series, witches were considered public enemy number one. In Europe and North America between the 15th and 17th centuries, some people believed magical witches were real, and that these witches used evil powers to bring physical harm or misfortune to others. As a result, tens of thousands of ordinary women and some men were put on trial to discover if they were witches – and thousands were executed for imaginary crimes. Spoiler alert: these people weren't practising magic which isn't real – and they weren't witches. But back then, it didn't take much to be accused of being a witch! Read on to discover six of the totally normal things that might've landed you on trial for witchcraft… The age…

1 Legend says that if a bat flies into your home on Halloween, your house is haunted. 2 NASA calls this nebula (a cloud of gas and dust in outer space) Witch Head because it looks like a screaming witch. 3 People on the Italian island of Sardinia call the pumpkins they carve for Halloween concas de mortu, meaning heads of the dead. 4 A skeleton museum in Oklahoma City, USA, uses flesh-eating beetles to clean the bones of animals. 5 The Queen Mary, a docked luxury ocean liner in Long Beach, California, is said to be one of the most haunted spots in the USA, with regular ghost sightings of sailors and a lady in white. 6 Soon after opening King Tut's tomb in Egypt in 1922, one of…

CRISSCROSS CHALLENGE Can you fit these Halloween words into this grid? BAT BROOMSTICK CAULDRON GHOST MOONLIGHT  PUMPKIN SKELETON SPIDER WITCH ZOMBIE We've added some letters to get you started! CREEPY CALC Can you solve these spine-tingling sums? CLUE! The answers are all here… HALLOWEEN SUDOKUS Fill the empty squares so every row, column and 2x2 box contains the numbers 1-4. MAKE MORE WORDS Try to come up with as many words as you can (containing four or more letters) using the letters in… 1-6 Wicked work – Can you scare up a few more words? 7-12 Spook-tacular – You conjured up plenty of words! 13+ Fang-tastic – You'd better boo-lieve you're a word wizard! Answers on page 49 GHOST HUNT Which two spooks only appear once on these pages? SPOOKY…

Field of Screams A hayride is a fun event, often held at Halloween, in which a group of people go for a ride in a wagon filled with hay. On a dark and adjective night, my friends and I decided to go on a(n) adjective hayride. As we rode through the farmer's type of food field, I felt a(n) noun run down my spine. My friends laughed and playfully called me a scaredy-animal. That's when we heard loud verb ending in -ing all around us. “exclamation!” I yelled. My friends said it was probably just the wind verb ending in -ing through the trees, but they looked scared, too. Suddenly, we saw the shape of a(n) adjective monster appear out of thin noun. It had colour skin and large number…

Robot rabbits help catch pythons! News hop off the press from Florida, USA, where biologists want to see if robot rabbits can help control the population of invasive Burmese pythons! Over 10,000 of the Southeast Asian reptiles live in the state's swamps, where they've killed over 95% of small mammals since escaping from the pet trade in the 1970s. Determined to protect the remaining wildlife, biologists are working to catch and remove as many pythons as possible – but they're hard to find, so the team are luring them in with robotic rabbits! Powered by solar power, the toy bunnies look, move and even smell like wild marsh rabbits, which the pythons eat. Each lookalike is placed in a pen and monitored with cameras. When a snake slithers by, a signal…

Hold on tight! When wildlife photojournalist Doug Gimesy first caught sight of this flying fox, he thought its feet were tangled in rubbish. But when the fruit bat got closer, he had a stunning surprise. “She was flying with a baby!” he says. “And the pup was barely hanging on!” Flying foxes can soar up to 50km each day in search of food such as fruit, nectar or pollen, and when the babies are young and light the mums bring their pups along for the ride. “The baby bats clamp on to their mothers with their teeth and hold on to her fur with their feet,” Doug explains. Unfortunately, if the pups are too heavy or lose their grip, they can fall off. “I work as a flying fox rescuer…

Amazingly, thousands of people identify as being witches today! But don't worry – they don't have evil powers either! Instead, these ‘witches’ perform rituals to feel connected to the world around them. Here's how some tools of the trade are used by the fictional witches in books and films and modern-day ‘witches’… IT'S MAGIC: In movies like The Wizard of Oz, brooms aren't just for sweeping. Spellcasters like the Wicked Witch of the West use them to zoom across the sky. IN REAL LIFE: Witches sometimes use brooms symbolically in rituals to cleanse spaces of negative energy – not for flying. IT'S MAGIC: In stories, witches use a knife called an athame (say “a-thuh-may”) to trace spell symbols and prepare potions. IN REAL LIFE: Athames are used by witches to…

SAND TRAP Watch your step! The stargazer fish, found in oceans around the world, buries its body in sand and waits for unlucky fish and crabs to bob by. Then – chomp! IT'S RAINING SNAKES If you're in a particular cave near Kantemó, southern Mexico, look up: Yucatán rat snakes are hanging from the ceiling and slithering along the walls! When bats fly in or out, the snakes strike to grab a meal. Sounds like they should be renamed BAT snakes! ALL ABOARD This mother tailless whip scorpion is giving nearly 50 babies a lift on her back! The hatchlings will ride on their mum for a few weeks, until their first moult (when they shed their exoskeletons to grow). These arachnids live in tropical and subtropical regions. SEEING RED…

ART ZONE! Hi NGK! Hope you like our scavenger hunt artwork. I went on a walk in the woods with my brother and we collected leaves and twigs to make crazy faces. We think they are fab! Luke, 9, and Brodie, 5 • We think they're fab, too, Luke. Love them! ECO HERO! Hi Nat Geo Kids, I recently raised money for WWF. I ran a stall at my school's summer fair with some friends. All the things we sold were handmade by us. We called ourselves the Animal Allies. We raised £135.80 – I like to think that we have helped the planet. Hazel, 9 • Amazing fundraising, Hazel! FANTASTIC FOSSIL! Hello NG KiDS! When I was in Lyme Regis, I found this fossil on the rock beach. It…

Answers on page 49 TOP TIP! If you get stuck on one of the clues, move on to some others. You can go back to it when you've got extra letters! EXTRA HARD! You might need to work with a grown-up on this one! ACROSS 3 It takes a silver bullet to kill one of these howling shapeshifters! (8) 7 A Jewish boy's 13th birthday celebration (3,7) 9 The body of water between Ireland and Great Britain (5,3) 10 Playing card that's one lower than a jack (3) 11 You might knock on this when trick-or-treating (4) 13 A Disney movie about a young deer (5) 14 Where Dracula might make a deposit! (5,4) 18 Something you wear when you're cooking (5) 19 A board game with rooks and pawns (5) 20 Expanse of water separati ng continents (5) 21…

Rock on, sheep! We've all seen fields full of sheep – but what if they were made out of rocks?! Inspired by a visit to Stonehenge in the UK, farmer Mart Maastik and stonemason Janek Teller have created a flock of 300 stone sheep on the island of Saaremaa, in Estonia, northern Europe. They include a Lamb Parliament, Lamb Army and even Lambhenge. Baa-rilliant! Ghostly images Artist Nick Veasey makes pictures out of X-rays! He scans bones, clothes, objects and even vehicles before stitching the layers together on a computer. Working with X-ray radiation is dangerous, so Nick works in a special bunker and often uses old donated skeletons. Super-spooky! Silly sketches! Italian artist Pietro Cataudella draws pictures in notebooks and then takes photos of his sketches in front of…

Coastal wolf pups start to learn to swim when they're about twoand-a-half months old. Many First Nations Canadians honour coastal wolves some groups consider them ancestors. Wolves often howl in a chorus. A wolf pads across a sandy beach. Catching a scent, it paws at the wet sand in search of a buried clam. Crunch! The wolf crushes the clam in its jaws and swallows. Still hungry, it splashes into the ocean waves and swims to a nearby island to find more food. Wolves on the beach might sound strange, but small populations of these grey wolves have been living by the seaside in North America for thousands of years. Known as coastal wolves, about 2,000 of these individuals make their homes among the small islands and coastal rainforest of western…

SQUIRMY WORMY These photos show close-up views of creepy little critters. Unscramble the letters to identify what's in each picture. BONUS: Use the yellow letters to help you answer the joke below… Answers on page 49 QUESTION: What do you call a flying insect that's always complaining?…

What you'll need 1 pack of ready-rolled puff pastry About 60g grated Parmesan cheese (or vegetarian / vegan alternative) Flour for dusting To decorate: Red pepper cut into tongues Black olives cut into little eyes Egg (optional) Poppy seeds (optional) Start here! TOP TIP Want some extra flavour? Try sprinkling a pinch of garlic or mustard powder onto the pastry in step 1. 1 First, ask an adult to preheat the oven to 220°C / Gas 7. Unroll the puff pastry and sprinkle most of the Parmesan over the top. Then carefully fold in half widthways. 2 On a floured surface, roll out the pastry into a rectangle that's about as thick as a £1 coin. Then cut the rolled pastry into 1cm-wide strips. 3 Twizzle each strip several times…