A Pirate's Quest is the winner of seven MAJOR awards including the Mom's Choice Award.

To improve reading skills for children in Eastern Kentucky, today Carl and Jean are donating 500 copies of their award-winning book, A Pirate’s Quest, to the nonprofit Save the Children. The books will be distributed to four elementary schools in Whitley County, Kentucky.

Carl and Jean are also donating four copies of our award-winning DVD movie, The Riddle in a Bottle, upon which the book is based, to the four elementary schools. The movie is the winner of 21 awards, including the Best of Children’s Programming in the BLUE Ocean Film Festival.

“Reading stimulates the imagination. It can open the door to wondrous adventures!” Carl says about the donation.

A Pirate’s Quest, the winner of seven major awards, helps children learn how life on earth is connected by moving water. The book includes more than fifty original oil paintings by our good friend Heiner Hertling, an award-winning artist and host of the PBS television show Your Brush With Nature.

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Shark photo courtesy stock.xchng.

Good news for sharks! Congress passes the Shark Conservation Act of 2010 to ban unimaginable shark finning, where the fins of live sharks are cut off and the sharks are thrown back in the water to die, in U.S. waters.

Learn more in the article, “Congress Passes Shark Conservation Act to Ban Gruesome Finning Practices“.

Help Children Learn About Ocean Conservation
Our award-winning children’s book, A Pirate’s Quest, and movie, The Riddle in a Bottle, help children learn that life on earth is connected by moving water. Your children will learn an appreciation for sharks and other wildlife.

Testimonial
“We embarked on our journey with the book,  A Pirate’s Quest and immediately the children were engrossed by the illustrations as they are not only beautiful but a realistic depiction of plants and animals living from the lakes to the sea. We followed the pirate on his quest in the book and I listened as they made predictions about where the missing peg leg might be. 

Some were surprised, some knew right away, but all were excited that the pirate found his leg by the sea! We then made our own mural of “moving water” complete with the printable materials that you provided on your website. The children absolutely loved this activity; they were working together peacefully, cooperating as a group and helping one another.” Suzanne Bendick, Sourdough  Montessori School — Click here to see pictures and learn more about this water mural activity.

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Do you care about keeping our Great Lakes and oceans clean? The International Coastal Cleanup 2010 from the Ocean Conservancy is this Saturday and you can help!

The Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup, in partnership with organizations and individuals across the globe, engages people to remove trash and debris from the world’s beaches and waterways, identify the sources of debris, and change the behaviors that cause marine debris in the first place.

Get Involved!
Sign up for a clean up near you.

10 Tips
10 Things You Can Do To Stop Marine Debris

Learn More
Ocean Conservancy International Coastal Cleanup
Good Morning America: Just One Thing: Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup

Help Your Children Learn About Rivers, Oceans and Our Environment
Our award-winning book, A Pirate’s Quest, and movie, The Riddle in a Bottle, have won 28 awards and teach kids that all life on earth is connected by moving water. Visit our “For Educators” Web page for free activities for kids. Watch The Riddle in a Bottle short movie trailer below.

Order Today
Call 1-800-552-1867 between 9:00am to 5:00pm EST (Eastern Standard Time) Monday through Friday to order A Pirate’s Quest and The Riddle in a Bottle.

Review
“The Riddle in a Bottle, by the multi-talented sister-brother team of Laura and Robert Sams, is an inventive, humorous tale that educates about the environment as it entertains. The Samses’ quirky dialogue, clever songs, and comedic timing combine with impressive footage of sea turtles, muskrats, and frogs to make for a splendid, original children’s flick.” – Melissa Chianta, Mothering Magazine

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President Barak Obama signed a new Executive Order establishing the National Ocean Council. This is good news in light of the disastrous, horrible BP oil spill.

This Executive Order establishes a new National Ocean Policy for the “stewardship of the ocean, our coasts, and Great Lakes, which sets our Nation on a path toward comprehensive planning for the preservation and sustainable uses of these bodies of water.”

Below is an excerpt from the Executive Order (PDF):

“Section 1. Purpose. The ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes provide jobs, food, energy resources, ecological services, recreation, and tourism opportunities, and play critical roles in our Nation’s transportation, economy, and trade, as well as the global mobility of our Armed Forces and the maintenance of international peace and security. The
Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and resulting environmental crisis is a stark reminder of how vulnerable our marine environments are, and how much communities and the Nation rely on healthy and resilient ocean and coastal ecosystems. America’s stewardship of the ocean, our coasts, and the Great Lakes is intrinsically linked to environmental sustainability, human health and well-being, national prosperity, adaptation to climate and other environmental changes, social justice, international diplomacy, and national and homeland security.”

Learn more in the story, “Forging a Coherent Oceans Policy“, in The New York Times. For additional information visit the White House Web page for the National Ocean Council.

To learn how life on Earth is connected by moving water, watch the video clip below from our award-winning children’s movie, The Riddle in a Bottle. Share this video with your kids to help them learn about the importance of ocean and water conservation.

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For threatened wildlife in Gulf, it may be too little too late. BP will be liable for billions of dollars of damage to compensate for wildlife killed from the oil spill, according to the article, “Oil spill: How much is a pelican worth?”.

“What concerns us most is the animals we can’t see,” Rowan Gould, acting director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, said during a press conference earlier this week. “They are foraging the same waters that are inundated with oil right now.”

"The Riddle in a Bottle" DVD is the winner of Best Children's Film in Patagonia's Wild and Scenic Film Festival, the largest environmental film festival in the United States.

Our award winning movie, The Riddle in a Bottle, teaches kids…and adults, how life on earth is connected by moving water.

All children, especially future oil executives for BP and other companies, should watch this movie.

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"The Riddle in a Bottle" DVD features loggerhead sea turtles

Federal wildlife agencies proposed Wednesday increased protections for loggerhead turtles along both U.S. coasts, according to the article “U.S. wildlife agencies seek protections for loggerhead turtles” in The Baltimore Sun.

Ever since viewing the first clips from our award winning movie, The Riddle in a Bottle, featuring baby loggerhead sea turtles drifting along the ocean currents under floating mats of algae, I’ve been intrigued by these graceful and calm creatures. A loggerhead sea turtle is also featured in our award winning children’s nature book, A Pirate’s Quest.

According to the article in The Baltimore Sun, it was discovered that the status of seven of nine population groups of the turtles around the world had worsened to the point that they should be considered endangered. Learn more.

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Laura Sams and Robert Sams, authors of our book A Pirate’s Quest, and directors of our DVD movie The Riddle in a Bottle, enjoy sharing their talents through author visits and live performances each year. You can watch their wonderful presentation in Dubai in the video above.

They have performed at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and the Chicago Field Museum to hundreds of schools and libraries across the United States.

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KIDS FIRST! announced its Best of the Year Awards, and our underwater film The Riddle in a Bottle won the Best Educational Film for Ages 5 to 12.

KIDS FIRST! is the world’s largest film festival, run by the Coalition for Quality Children’s Media, a national, nonprofit organization that evaluates, rates and endorses children’s feature films, DVDs, videos, CDs, TV shows and interactive media.

Other 2009 Best of the Year first place winners include Elmo’s Christmas Countdown from Sesame Workshop, Ish from Weston Woods and Goosebumps: The Scarecrow Walks at Midnight from Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment.

Learn more about The Riddle in a Bottle.

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Watch this amazing footage as Steve Leonard gets up close and personal with a giant octopus in the freezing sea waters. Would you be happy to get this close to an Extreme Animal with giant eyes and pale blue blood? Find out now as you take a dive into this beautiful aquatic environment.

The common Atlantic octopus is featured in our children’s book, A Pirate’s Quest, but it’s not nearly as large as the octopus featured in the video.

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Whale Shark Tooth photo courtesy Sisbro Studios.

From the Sisbro Blog, Laura Sams writes that in their next episode of The Riddle Solvers, they find an ancient journal with a riddle about shark teeth.

She is blown away by how tiny the whale shark teeth are, and how the biggest fish in the ocean has such tiny teeth. Learn more

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