Every month a 100-page science magazine arrives with your grandchild's name on the envelope. Then you call and ask what was strangest in it. That's the whole thing — and it works twelve times a year.
Cancel any time · US postage included · Send a Gift Email option at checkout
Addressed to her, not to her parents — and your name is in the corner of all twelve.
A teenager spends the whole day being asked questions by adults who already know the answer. That is what school is, and they can feel it. So “how was school?” gets “fine,” and it always will.
“What did you read about this month?” is the only question where the child is the expert and the adult is the student.
You don't sign the report card. You aren't responsible for their grades or whether the room is tidy. You have no stake in the answer except wanting to hear it — and children can tell the difference instantly. The magazine simply makes sure there is always something to answer with.
Bookmark this page and keep it open wherever you make your calls. Start at the top and stop whenever they take over — usually by question two.
Question one never changes — that's the point. By the third or fourth issue they start reading with an answer in mind, because they know the question is coming and who is going to ask it. And question eight is one only you can ask: you remember nine planets, no exoplanets, and a world before the genome was read.
Physics, biology, astronomy, engineering and mathematics, written for readers old enough to be told the truth. Two editions at the same price: OYLA Junior for ages 8–12 and OYLA for 12–18. At checkout, send a Gift Email to let them know it's coming.
In a five-year randomised trial across 60 US schools, giving children about seven books a year to keep at home raised literacy achievement (Borman & Yang, PNAS, 2026 — d = 0.10 overall, 0.21 for those who received all five years). Across 54 experiments and 171,055 readers, comprehension is stronger on paper than on screen, and the gap is widest for informational texts — the kind this magazine is made of (Delgado et al., Educational Research Review, 2018). Grandparent involvement predicts fewer emotional problems in adolescents (Attar-Schwartz et al., Journal of Family Psychology, 2009, n = 1,515), and emotional closeness — not frequency of contact — is the part that helps both generations (Moorman & Stokes, The Gerontologist, 2016).
Wrong edition? We switch it mid-year at no cost. More than one grandchild — each gets their own subscription and their own envelope.
You'll know by the second call, and you can cancel and get the rest of the year back. But this is what question one is for: a child who knows they'll be asked what was strangest in the issue goes and finds something strange in the issue.
None of the nine questions require you to know any science. Several of them work better if you don't.
It ships straight to your grandchild's address. No batteries, no screen time, nothing to assemble or store — it arrives, gets read, and ends up one issue thick.
Yes — choose the month the first issue should land in.
