If you're devoted to explosions, and who isn't, you'll love the new expanded 2nd edition of William Gurstelle's Backyard Ballistics, now 25% longer, with 25% more ka-boomery. Still the go-to reference work for building rockets, cannons (carbide and potato), flingers, fire kites, electromagnetic pipe guns, tennis ball mortars, cleaner-bag balloons, ballistic pendula and petards. You simply can't have more fun with common household materials. The soft-cover, 210pp compendium includes detailed and illustrated instructions, parts lists and sensible ways not to be hoist on your own petard. Be careful out there.

Very popular with elementary school teachers, these hardcover blank books let students create their own storybooks. (Middle-schoolers interviewing and making books for primary grade kids is a popular and civilizing project.) Also great for sketching, journaling or scrapbooking. Pure white blank covers with (14) sheets (28 pages) of 80-lb blank paper inside with a sewn-in binding. You pick the 6” x 8” books or the 8-1/2” x 11” versions.

OK, chicken plucking and how to build an igloo, but you could combine them if you needed to. How To is a book of wilderness skills with instructions on over (75) things you might need to know someday, including the two above, plus opening coconuts with a rock, sheep-shearing, crossing deserts (with the associated treating a snakebite), surviving bear attacks, starting fires in the rain, cleaning fish, tanning hides, and shoeing horses. Takes a nice, fun look at desperation in the woods. We've already used a bunch in the office.

Make a whole bunch of fun and instructive Lego® machines/chain reaction models like marble runs and mousetraps involving ramps, buckets, funnels balances and much more. Comes with (33) Lego® elements, (6) Lego® balls, a dozen paper props, and a 78-page instruction booklet for (10) machines. You add a few common household items. Includes suggestions for more complicated devices if you have your own Lego® pieces, and if you don't, what are you waiting for? Ages 8+.

Start them out right with this (profusely) hand-illustrated, 96-page book: The Story of Inventions. Includes toasters, toilets, television, computers, cars, chocolate bars, dishwashers, pianos, flying machines, bicycles and blue jeans among many others. Includes a timeline, glossary and index. No age recommendations, but we like it for pretty much anyone.

50 Science Things to Make and Do is just that, a passel of experiments, all illustratively explained in two facing pages of this big 104-page flip book, and all easily done with common household items. Includes wind and water power, bugs, crystals, paper planes, rubber-band guitars, balances, gloop, optics and a ton of other fun, informative stuff. Officially classified as "cool" by several of our geekiest staffers.

"WE DARE YOU!" by Vicki Cobb is a 322-page book for children, filled with over (300) scientific challenges and experiments that can be done with ordinary household stuff. A savvy adult could introduce kids to science by betting them their allowance money on the afore-mentioned challenges, including making square eggs without using a square chicken, writing with potatoes, blowing frozen soap bubbles, and a whole bunch more.

Don't enroll—the faculty are all stiffs. Instead, get Zombie Doodles, a 144-page (gross!) spiral-bound book full of ghoulish scenes and activities, along with a bunch of cute-n-creepy stickers to add to your doodles of the undead. Measures approx 5-1/2” x 7-1/4”, including the spiral. Hours of imaginative fun await.

There's nothing better for long, lonely days than watching critters in the back yard, and this National Wildlife Federation® paperback, Attracting Birds, Butterflies, and Other Backyard Wildlife, shows you how to expand your local menagerie beyond squirrels and sparrows. Includes (17) wildlife-friendly projects for the entire family in (168) pages with more (200) color photographs. Contains instructions on getting your yard or garden certified as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat, too. Be the first on your block to be able to say that at a cocktail party.

Same here, but we're just 150 miles from Mount Horeb, Wisconsin, the troll capital of the world, so we have a special devotion to the little long-haired cuties. Troll along with us and grab anything that appeals to you: Good Luck Trolls is a “hair-raising journal,” an 8” x 6” hardcover book with scattered trolls and blank pages for you to write down your deepest troll thoughts; the Mad About Trolls activity book has (24) pages of fun, quizzes, puzzles, stickers and general trollishness; and the fun Trolls' card games and book of tricks includes a deck of cards with, yes, Jacks, Queens and Kings of Trolls, plus troll tricks. If all this makes you want to visit Mount Horeb, don't miss the National Mustard Museum, either.