By BRUCE HALLETT

Most magazines have an editorial board to advise on important decisions. At TIME FOR KIDS, managing editor Claudia Wallis also has a private sounding board--her "own little focus group of one"--son Nathaniel, 9. The good word on TFK's prototypes: he liked them! And as would any informed adviser, Nat had a suggestion: Do more stuff on sports. Voila! A story on Cal Ripken Jr.

TIME FOR KIDS, an eight-page weekly, makes its debut this week, and will be published throughout the school year for readers in Grades 4 through 6. It will deliver hard news with beguiling graphs and photographs. "This is the first true newsmagazine for the classroom," says Time managing editor Jim Gaines, "and the only one produced by a major news organization." The competition is impressive and venerable: the 67-year-old Weekly Reader and the 54-year-old Scholastic News. But TFK is already a serious challenger. At birth it weighed in at a robust 700,000 subscriptions.

For all Nat's input and Wallis' credentials (a former TIME writer and senior editor, she was nominated this year for a National Magazine Award), TFK is no mom-and-son operation. Its staff of nine includes alumnae of Weekly Reader, Kid City Magazine, TIME and the TIME Education Program, as well as prodigies from Middlebury College and the Rhode Island School of Design. It will also tap TIME's network of writers and correspondents for stories of interest to the skateboard set.

The idea grew from a visit that Lisa Quiroz, TFK's general manager, made to her old grade school on Staten Island, New York. She found that kids were offered the same sources of news that she had used as a child. "Teachers expressed a dire need for something current," she says. TFK is addressing that need.

In the debut cover story, on Bosnia, the task for Wallis and chief of research Nelida Gonzalez Cutler, who co-wrote the story, was to clarify the bitter historic roots of the struggle. "Adults have trouble understanding Bosnia," says Wallis. "Try explaining it to a nine-year-old!"

Helping preteens make sense of the world is the challenge that Wallis and her team will face each week. And if she falls short, you know which nine-year-old she'll hear from first.