I was amazed to see that they all fit together in one large circle. I knew the map was really a globe and the circle of land l had just made only covered about half of the earth. What happened to the stickers or the land for the other half? l then guessed the missing continents had come off and became the moon. l showed this to my parents and to my eight-year-old friend, Peter, who lived across the road. No one cared. I was only nine years old and had just done a "very stupid thing."

      In 1953 I could not have known that others had done this before me. In 1912, Alfred Wegener, a German geologist wrote a book showing that mountains, fossils and minerals on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean seemed to match. It was obvious that at one time long ago, the Americas and the continents of Europe and Africa had been connected. Wegener's proof was remarkable. Wegener was a respected German scientist, but his book was only published in German.

      Maybe it was anti-German feelings caused by World War I, or maybe scientific jealousy or just maybe most American scientists clung to their �religious belief� that the continents have always been where they are now, right where they were �created.� Either way, American scientists did not accept Wegener�s ideas. No one cared. In fact, most British and American scientists had never heard of him.

      Wegener's book ''The Origin of Continents and Oceans'' was not even translated into English until 1962. Exciting scientific discoveries in paleo-geology and paleo-biology now made it impossible to cling to the older ideas. By 1970 Wegener's book became the center of an explosion of new and now widely accepted ideas such as continental drift, mid-ocean ridges, polar-wandering, plate-tectonics and even crustal hot-spots.

      I suspect even now in 1993 most scientists have never read Wegener's book. They only have the �received� version taught in university textbooks. Wegener's scientific struggles, the dangling data, the problematic passages, the theoretical rough-edges that just don't seem to fit, all have been erased. Most scientists are not aware that Wegener discussed at length, but left unanswered the problem that now stands as a glaring hole right in the middle of modern geologic science - �What happened to the missing continental material on the Earth?�

      That statement about assessment was true when Wegener wrote it long ago. But now the assessment can be done. It is NOT possible for the missing continents to be compressed, folded up and hidden under the mountains of the world. So where did they go? Current theories explain that the missing continents were sucked down the rat-hole of sub-duction zones where they melt back into the hot mantle. But the "sial" or silicon and aluminum crustal material is much lighter and floats on top of the heavy iron and magnesium mantle. So this is like expecting a ping-pong ball floating on a pond to be �sub-ducted� beneath the water never to be seen again.

      Even better, it is like pretending a layer of frothy impure dross floating on a pool of pure dense molten gold will be �sub-ducted� and re-mix itself with the pure gold. That has never been shown to happen. Is it possible the missing continents and the moon are one and the same? In 1953 I did a "very stupid thing.'' In 1993 the mystery of the missing continents became the nucleus of what the Kinderken now call ''The Moon Project.�

      The Kinderken consist of a science-minded father and three active and inquisitive kids willing to expand their minds into uncharted scientific domains. To do this we needed to learn to use some basic scientific tools and methods before we could launch on our adventure.

      In the spring of 1993 we began a series of projects, experiments, excursions to creeks and parks and lots of walks around the neighborhood. We studied rocks, plants. animals, water flow, weather, whatever we could find that looked fun and fascinating.

      I gave a series of short lectures using a white board and the young Kinderken took notes. This had two purposes. We learned how to look up information, how to understand and calculate, area, volume, velocity, mass and the scientific notation for very large numbers. We also learned how to take down complete and proper notes and how to transfer those notes to a logbook. All of the signed and dated notes of lectures, experiments and observations are put into a loose-leaf notebook.

      Our logbook is a scientific page-numbered bound journal with all entries in ink, dated and signed. We used several references including Van Nostrand's Scientific Encyclopedia, CRC Standard Mathematical Tables, and several books on astronomy.

      We calculated areas and volumes of the earth and moon. We made a ''model of the moon.� We found the volume of the missing continents and the volume of the moon were almost exactly the same. We found that the density of the moon and the density of the rocky continents are about the same. therefore, the mass of the moon and the mass of the missing continents are almost exactly the same.

      Using modeling clay and the scale of our 12 inch globe we very carefully made a flat clay sheet equal in area to the total area of the earth oceans, or the ''missing continents.'' The thickness was the average depth to the asthenosphere. The asthenosphere is the hot liquid lava layer beneath the earth's crust. We rolled the clay into a ball to be our �Kinderken� moon.

      We measured our scale moon and found it to be just slightly larger than the real moon. We considered the possible reasons for the error and put everything in our logbook. We also looked at the fact that this experiment proved nothing about the moon coming from the earth. It only proved that the moon and �the missing continental material'' are extremely alike in volume and mass and that's all. What it did show was that seven and nine year old children can do calculations, make predictions and carry out an experiment to confirm their scientific predictions and to record the results in a logbook.

      Not recorded was the joy we had playing with the clay. If the clay was too cold it just would not roll out thin enough (59 thousands of an inch, about the thickness of a piece of cardboard) no matter how hard we tried. If the clay was too hot it stuck like tar to everything, to the roller, and to hands, clothes and carpet. We finally ended up with warm creamy clay, spread with a trowel, and when the surface cooled so it was not sticky, we rolled it to just the right thickness. This is recorded as �tries 1, 2 and 3'', but all the huffing, puffing. snickering, jeering. giggling and cheering just never made it on to paper.

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