Word of the day and fact of the day for kids

Peabody's word of the day for October 29, 2026 is "tiny" (very, very small) at level 2, up to "incandescent" at level 8, with a fact at each of levels 1 to 13. Words and facts come from Peabody's own banks, with no AI, and are free through the end of 2026.

By Aaron, founder of PeabodyChecked 29 October 2026

Level	Word of the day	What it means	In a sentence
2	tiny	very, very small	A tiny ant carried a crumb all the way home.
3	damp	a little bit wet	The towel is still damp.
4	stubborn	refusing to change your mind	The stubborn mule would not budge.
5	mellow	soft, calm, and gentle	The mellow music helped me relax.
6	obscure	hide or make hard to see	Clouds obscured the moon.
7	benevolent	kind and wanting to help others	The benevolent queen fed the whole village.
8	incandescent	glowing with strong heat or light	The incandescent bulb lit the workshop.

Fact of the day

Level	Fact	From
1	Families come in all sizes. Some are big.	All Kinds of Families (Cultures)
2	People work at jobs to earn their money. A baker bakes bread for people to buy. A doctor helps sick people feel better.	Needs and Wants (Money)
3	In the southwest, the Ancestral Puebloans built homes of stone in the sides of cliffs. You can still go and see them at Mesa Verde. The Ute Mountain Ute and Southern Ute tribes live in the southwest part of the state today. They keep their own language and stories. They share them with their children.	Colorado's First Peoples (History)
4	In the woodwind family, a player blows air into a tube, and the air inside it shakes to make the sound. The flute and the clarinet are both woodwinds. A flute is made of metal, but it is still in this family! Brass players buzz their lips into a small cup called a mouthpiece. The trumpet and the tuba are brass. The buzzing lips make the air inside the long metal tube shake.	Instrument Families (Music)
5	Writers use similes and metaphors because plain words do not always show how something looks or feels. The sentence the night was dark tells you a little. The night was as dark as a cave lets you feel how dark it really was. When you write, look for a comparison that fits what you want to show. Try writing a simile first, and then see if you can turn it into a metaphor.	Similes and Metaphors (Write)
6	Now start on A and play only white keys up to the next A: A, B, C, D, E, F, G and A. This is the A minor scale. Its full name is A natural minor. It uses the very same keys as C major, but it starts on a different note, so the half steps land in different places. Its pattern is W-H-W-W-H-W-W. To many listeners, minor music sounds darker or sadder, while major music sounds brighter. Not everyone hears it the same way, though, and composers can make either kind feel many ways.	Major and Minor (Music)
7	Is the ground under your feet really standing still? It feels solid, but it is actually moving very slowly all the time. Earth's hard outer shell is broken into huge pieces called tectonic plates, which fit together like the pieces of a cracked eggshell. Below the plates is a layer of hot rock that can flow very slowly, a little like thick, warm putty. As that deep rock slowly moves, the plates move along with it. Most plates travel only a few centimeters each year, which is about as fast as your fingernails grow.	Moving Plates (Science)
8	Ethos is an appeal to trust, in which the speaker tries to show that they are honest, careful or an expert on the subject. A poster saying that the town's dentists agree that brushing twice a day helps keep teeth healthy uses ethos, because dentists know a great deal about teeth. Pathos is an appeal to feelings, and it tries to make you feel happy, sad, proud or worried. An ad for an animal shelter might show a lonely puppy waiting by a door, hoping someone will take it home. That picture is meant to tug at your heart, which is exactly what pathos is designed to do.	Ethos, Pathos, Logos (Write)
9	A lever trades force for distance in exactly the same way, and it is simply a stiff bar that turns on a fixed point called the fulcrum. The part of the bar from the fulcrum to where you push is the effort arm, and the part from the fulcrum to the load is the load arm. The ideal mechanical advantage of a lever is the length of the effort arm divided by the length of the load arm. Say a long pry bar has an effort arm 90 centimeters long and a load arm 10 centimeters long. Its ideal mechanical advantage is 9, so a push of 100 newtons could lift a load of 900 newtons, but your hand must move nine times as far as the load does. Real machines lose some energy to friction, so their actual mechanical advantage is always a bit lower than the ideal one.	Work and Mechanical Advantage (Workshop)
10	How do you talk about something that already happened in Spanish? When an action was finished in the past, Spanish uses a past tense called the preterite, which treats the event as complete, with a clear beginning and end. To form it for a word like hablar, which means to speak, you take off the last two letters and add a new set of endings. Yo hablé means I spoke, and tú hablaste means you spoke when you are talking to a friend; él habló means he spoke, ella habló means she spoke, and ellos hablaron means they spoke. Look carefully at the small marks over some of the letters, because in Spanish those written accents are never there just for decoration.	The Past: the Preterite (Languages)
11	Since le and les can point to many different people, speakers often add a short phrase that begins with a, which makes the meaning clear or adds extra force. For example, A Ana le gusta el fútbol means that Ana likes soccer, and A mí me gusta el béisbol is a strong way of saying that I am the one who likes baseball. Several other verbs follow this same backward pattern, and one of the most useful is encantar, which means to please someone a great deal. So Me encanta el cine means I love the movies, and Le encantan los libros means he or she loves books. Remember the rule that holds for all of these verbs: the person goes in the small word in front, and the thing that is liked decides whether the verb is singular or plural.	Gustar and Verbs Like It (Languages)
12	Lateral reading also means checking the claim itself, not only the source. Corroboration is support for a claim from additional sources, so if a surprising fact appears on just one website and nowhere else, that is a warning sign worth taking seriously. The Library of Congress encourages students to ask how the factual information in a source can be corroborated, and what additional perspectives are needed before reaching a conclusion. None of this requires you to decide within a few seconds whether a site is good or bad. It simply asks you to gather evidence patiently from several independent directions, the way professional fact-checkers do, before you believe something, share it with friends or use it in your own schoolwork. With practice, a quick lateral check can take less than a minute and can save you from accidentally spreading something false to the people who trust you.	Reading Laterally (Online)
13	Why does your mind sometimes jump to the wrong answer? Much of everyday thinking relies on heuristics, which are mental shortcuts that let a person make quick judgments without working carefully through every detail of a problem. Shortcuts are usually helpful; without them, ordinary decisions, such as choosing a checkout line or estimating how long homework will take, would become slow and tiring, and you would have no time left for the things you want to do. In some situations, however, a shortcut leads people astray in a predictable direction, and that consistent, one-sided error is called a cognitive bias. In 1974 the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman published an influential paper in the journal Science, titled “Judgment under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases.” The paper described three common heuristics, called representativeness, availability, and anchoring and adjustment, and it showed how each of them can produce systematic mistakes in judgment.	Mental Shortcuts and Biases (Think)

Each fact is a page from one of Peabody's World trails, which carry named sources; this one cites Todd Parr, The Family Book (Little, Brown, 2003): a picture book about many kinds of families.

How the day's picks are made

Nothing is written for the day and nothing is asked of a child. The date picks one word from each level's bank of 40 words and one fact from each level's bank (61 facts at level 1, 63 facts at level 2, 53 facts at level 3, 50 facts at level 4, 49 facts at level 5, 39 facts at level 6, 39 facts at level 7, 39 facts at level 8, 39 facts at level 9, 39 facts at level 10, 38 facts at level 11, 39 facts at level 12 and 39 facts at level 13), visiting each before any repeats. The levels here are the grade-sized steps of Peabody's word and fact banks, not the reading levels 0 to 18; the word bank covers levels 2 to 8, the fact bank levels 1 to 3.

Keep going

Questions parents ask

How do I use the word of the day?

Say the word and its meaning at dinner, look for it in a book, and use it once yourself. Then see if your child spots it.

Which level should my child read?

Pick the row near your child's grade. Level 2 is about 2nd grade and level 8 is a strong middle-school reader; the levels and grades page shows where each grade starts.

Is it free?

Yes, free through the end of 2026, with no sign-up.

Earlier days

Checked against how Peabody works on 29 October 2026. Written with help from AI, from Peabody's own code and library. Peabody is a learning app, not an assessment: if you're worried about your child's learning, talk to their teacher.