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STEM Tuesday Inventors- Those Awesome People of Science – Writing Craft & Resources

By on May 15, 2018   /   Diversity, Inventors / Inventions, New Releases, STEM Tuesday  

 

Reading Between the Facts

Don’t you just love it when a story comes to life? When you are reading something and you can smell the sooty aromas, hear the grinding gears of a new invention, taste the tang of tart pie? And when, long after you’ve put a book down, you find yourself wondering about the characters? But that’s fiction, right? A story that wraps you up and carries you away.

Wait, what about fact-filled books that transport you like that? When I looked at this month’s book list, packed with techy inventions and their nerdy inventors, a story that transported me was the last thing I expected. Physical science isn’t my thing, so I gritted my teeth anticipating some dull, dry reading.

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Boy was I wrong. Flying Machines: How the Write Brothers Soared had me so hooked I convinced my aerospace engineer husband he had to read it (sidenote: he was impressed with the accuracy of the content).  Eureka! Poems About Inventors drew me through periods of history I had never cared about. And then there’s Isaac The Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d which made me pondering how light works, I mean really think about the physics of it. A week later I found myself Googling “Newton’s Laws of Motion because I wanted to actually understand them – not just memorize them. How did this book do this to me?

I had to know.

So I did what every good writer does, I studied the words on the page. I looked at how Mary Losure cast stories, how she used sentences, how she arranged paragraphs, and how she constructed chapters that draw me in. And then I noticed something.

Writing Between the Facts

Mary Losure had written a lot between the facts. When you research a historical figure, you only have so much information.  From the level of detail included (like the child’s drawings found in the house where Isaac grew up) it is obvious that this author dug and dug and dug until she found gold. But even a gold nugget won’t reflect light unless it is polished and placed in just the right position – in this case it shone a spotlight on Isaac’s childhood attributes. Losure had to bridge the gaps between the facts.

I’m not saying she falsified facts. No, through clearly-stated, careful conjecture, she brilliantly brought her readers into the world of inquiry.

“Far in the future, a child’s drawings would be found scratched in the farmhouse’s soft stone walls: a windmill, a church, a figure with a spurred boot. It was clear the child who drew them was bright and imaginative. The pictures had been hidden by layers of plaster for many years. The people who found them wondered if the drawings had been made by Isaac. It was easy to imagine him scratching away, unnoticed by anybody in the busy household.” Page 5, The Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d

Once I noticed that, I turned my mental search engine on, pulled out my wet-erase markers and transparency paper. I got to work. I wanted to ferret out all of the hard facts on a page, find the gaps between them, and see how Losure bridged them. Laying the transparency paper over a page allowed me to mark up the page without leaving a mark in the book.

I highlighted the obvious facts in green, qualifying words in red, and passages I wasn’t sure about in yellow.

Page 5, Isaac The Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d 

Cool! Working my way through the book, I found lots of examples:

  • She presented us with quotes from texts he read: “In his book The Mysteries of Nature and Art, there were instructions for making: A Water Clock …” page 31
  • She admitted we don’t know but presented evidence: “No one today can know exactly how Isaac and his friends spent their time, but the list Isaac made …” page 55
  • She referenced oral history: “To this day, people tell an old familiar story …” page 122

I learned lots of writing moves from Mary Losure that day. And as a bonus, the next time I read a fact-filled text, you can be sure my mind will read right between the facts – that’s an skill for every reader needs to hone.

—–

By Heather L. Montgomery

Heather L. Montgomery writes for kids who are WILD about animals. She reads and writes while high in a tree, standing in a stream, or perched on a mountaintop boulder. www.HeatherLMontgomery.com

The O.O.L.F Files

For the Out of Left Field (O.O.L.F) post, let’s look at inventions gone wrong.

Some inventions are completely pointless, like shoe umbrellas and the car exhaust grill : http://www.complex.com/style/2013/05/25-inventions-that-are-completely-pointless/air-conditioned-shoes

Inventions aren’t always used the way they were intended. Read how a soybean fertilizer became Agent Orange and why the Wright brothers regretted creating airplanes:

http://bigthink.com/laurie-vazquez/6-scientists-who-regret-their-greatest-inventions

Time shares 50 of the worst inventions, including pay toilets, DDT and hair in a can:

http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1991915,00.html

And then there are always human errors… To read true tales of technological disasters, check out Steven Casey’s Set Phasers on Stun.

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Sporty Girls! Interview with J.H. Diehl and Laura Shovan

By on May 14, 2018   /   Author Interviews, For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers  

We are thrilled to have on the Mixed Up Files today two authors with new middle grade books featuring awesome girls in sports! Welcome to J.H. Diehl, whose TINY INFINITIES came out on May 8th, and Laura Shovan, whose TAKEDOWN releases on June 19th.

TINY INFINITIES: When Alice’s dad moves out, leaving her with her troubled mother, she does the only thing that feels right: she retreats to her family’s old Renaissance tent in the backyard, determined to live there until her dad comes home. In an attempt to keep at least one part of her summer from changing, Alice focuses on her quest to swim freestyle fast enough to get on her swim team’s record board. But summers contain multitudes, and soon Alice meets an odd new friend, Harriet, whose obsession with the school’s science fair is equal only to her conviction that Alice’s best stroke is backstroke, not freestyle. Most unexpected of all is an unusual babysitting charge, Piper, who is mute—until Alice hears her speak. A funny and honest middle-grade novel, this sharply observed depiction of family, friendship, and Alice’s determination to prove herself—as a babysitter, as a friend, as a daughter, as a person—rings loud and true.

TAKEDOWN: Mikayla is a wrestler; when you grow up in a house full of brothers who are die-hard mat heads, it’s in your DNA. She even has a wrestling name: Mickey. Some people don’t want a girl on the team. But that won’t stop her. She’s determined to work hard, and win.

Lev is determined too–he’s going to make it to the state championship. He’s used to training with his two buddies as the Fearsome Threesome. But at the beginning of sixth grade, he’s paired with a new partner—a girl. This better not get in the way of his goal.

Mickey and Lev work hard together, and find a way to become friends. But at States, there can only be one winner.

This warmhearted, engaging novel by the author of the highly praised The Last Fifth Grade of Emerson Elementary explores competition among athletes, how it influences family and friendships, and what happens when one girl wants to break barriers in a sport dominated by boys.

TINY INFINITIES centers on a swimmer and TAKEDOWN features wrestlers. What inspired you to write about these sports? What was hard and what was fun about doing a deep dive into them?

Laura: I’m a recovering wrestling mom. My son wrestled for many years. During his practices and tournaments, I would sit in the bleachers and write in my notebook – little poems and sketches about what I observed on and off the mat. When my son moved on from the sport, I wasn’t ready to leave it behind. I still wanted to understand what it means to compete one-on-one, with no equipment other than your body, your brain, and your training. I needed to think through youth sports, and how competing at a high level affects not only the young athlete, but their entire family.

The hard part? By the time I was ready to write TAKEDOWN, it had been several years since my son hung up his wrestling boots. I had to relearn the sport and that was definitely a deep dive. I interviewed coaches, athletes, and wrestling parents, went to competitions, and watched hours of documentaries and tournaments on YouTube. The interviews were my favorite part. I love hearing people’s stories as I research a book. I made some good friends in the process.

Jean: In TINY INFINITIES, I wanted thirteen-year-old Alice to have an activity and a place to go outside her family. And I wanted her to have a goal she was seriously passionate about besides her goal to reunite her family. It needed to be a summer activity, because fireflies also play a key role in the story, and the season for fireflies in summer. For me, the book is partly about how a sport like swimming can help a kid through tough times.

Like Laura, I’m the mom of two kids who participated in the sport I wrote about. My son and daughter swam for a community pool summer team for more than a decade. I married into a swimming family, and in fact I’m the only person in two generations who did not grow up swimming competitively. We have age group, high school and college swimmers, water polo players, and one of my sisters-in-law trained to swim with the Argentine Olympic team. So I guess you could say TINY INFINITIES is my contribution to a family tradition.

The hard part, for me, was that Alice turns into a backstroker, and I don’t swim backstroke. Fortunately, I had plenty of family members to consult. I did lots of research, too, including – like Laura – reviewing YouTube videos, especially to watch backstroke races and tutorials in backstroke ‘starts’ and ‘turns’. The fun part was writing about what it’s like to participate in summer swim meets. I also loved getting to write in detail about something I’d never accomplished myself, that is, winning a backstroke race. And (minor spoiler alert) I loved writing about what it felt like for Alice to achieve her goal in the sport.

There seems to be so much pressure on girls these days to be “Instagram-ready,” and many aspire to a particular kind of stereotypical beauty and glamour. You’re showcasing a different type of girl. Did you think about the stereotypes that are imposed on girls and how to respond to that in your book?

Laura: One of my main characters, Mickey, is the first girl on an all-boy wrestling team. As a female athlete competing in a traditionally male, contact sport, Mickey has to confront deeply held beliefs about whether girls have the physicality, ability, and emotional strength to step on the mat and face a boy. It was important to me to give Mickey some female friends to talk this through with (her two older brothers – both wrestlers – help too). The character of Kenna, Mickey’s best friend and wrestling partner, is more aware than Mickey that middle school girls are expected to conform to feminine stereotypes. Her decision to walk away from the sport is devastating for Mickey.

I also wanted to look at societal beliefs about male athletes. The other main character in TAKEDOWN, Lev, sees wrestling as an important part of his identity. But when the coach assigns him to be Mickey’s training partner, Lev starts to question stereotypes too, especially around boys and toughness.

Jean: In my book, Alice’s new best friend, Harriet, is entirely engaged by her interests in math and science. Harriet enjoys reciting the first three hundred digits of pi and is laser-focused on creating a winning project for next year’s school science fair. She’s humble about being super-advanced in math, has an eclectic curiosity for the science of the world around her, and eventually leads an experiment to recreate firefly bioluminescence in a makeshift lab. Harriet is not entirely oblivious to feminine stereotypes around her, but she doesn’t allow them to define her – she has no time for them. I wanted to contrast Harriet with Alice, who has grown away from a group of friends more influenced by conventional stereotypes. I think Harriet gives Alice some sense of freedom to just be herself.

Friendship is an important part of both books, as well, and is such an important part of kids’ lives in the middle grade years. What was your goal in featuring these friendships?

Laura: My goal was to reflect the experience of moving out of the elementary school bubble and into junior high, a transition which can strain friendships. There are new kids to meet, new academic pressures, and a busier schedule as students travel between classes. Suddenly, the friends kids spent most of their elementary school day with are pulled in different directions. Both Mickey and Lev put so much time into their training and competition schedule, it’s easy for their non-wrestling friends to feel neglected. I wanted to show how my main characters struggle to form a good partnership with each other, even as they each fight to keep old friendships intact.

Jean: In my book, Alice makes three unlikely new friends. The first is Piper, a four-year-old girl who has lost the ability to speak and to hear language; the second Owen, Piper’s half-brother, an aspiring sushi chef who’s spending his summer being bounced around among relatives; the third is Harriet, who is new to the swim team and also thirteen. Unlike Alice, who has a talent for connecting to people, Harriet’s social skills are kind of like a stereo tuner with its treble and bass out of balance. Over the course of Alice’s life-changing summer, she influences her new friends in a profound way, and is influenced by them. My goal was to characterize how the good friendships we make – sometime the most unlikely friendships we make – can help us to grow up.

Thank you, Laura and Jean, for sharing your wonderful stories with us!

Kate Hillyer was a high school soccer player, including one ill-fated game against Mia Hamm. She runs, writes, and raises her three kids in Washington, D.C. You can find her online at katehillyer.com, and on Twitter as @SuperKate. She also blogs at The Winged Pen. 

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Interview and Giveaway

By on May 12, 2018   /   Author Interviews, For Kids, For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers, Giveaways  

A.M. Morgen’s fascinating debut novel “The Inventors at No. 8” published this week. Here’s a summary:

Meet George, the third Lord of Devonshire and the unluckiest boy in London. Why is George so unlucky? First, he’s an orphan. Second, unless he sells everything, he’s about to lose his house. So when his family’s last heirloom, a priceless map to the Star of Victory (a unique gem said to bring its owner success in any battle) is stolen by a nefarious group of criminals, George knows that there is no one less lucky-or more alone-than he is.

That is until Ada Byron, the future Countess of Lovelace, bursts into his life. She promises to help George recover his family legacy, and is determined to find her own father along the way–all in a flying machine she built herself. Joined by a mischievous orangutan and the long-lost son of an infamous pirate, Ada and George take off on a cross-continent journey through the skies that will change their lives, and perhaps the world, forever.

And now a few words from  A.M. about the phenomenon of automotons!

Before I started writing my debut novel, Inventors at No. 8, I didn’t know what an automaton was. Now, I’m mildly obsessed with them! And judging by the number of kid’s books that feature automatons, I’m not the only author who finds them fascinating.

If you’re not yet familiar with what an automaton is, here’s a brief description: An automaton is a non-electronic machine shaped like a human or animal that follows a pre-determined set of movements. Basically, it’s the clockwork version of a robot. If you had a jack-in-the-box as a kid, then you’ve played with a very simple automaton. Complex automatons have been made that can play musical instruments, write letters, and draw pictures.

Fictional portrayals of automatons can be an interesting indication of how society is reacting to advances in technology. Most often automatons are associated with steampunk or Victorian fiction, but because they have been around for over a thousand years, automatons could be part of any setting from ancient Greece to the present day. These machines can help set the tone of a story depending on whether they are amusing or helpful or sinister.  

Have I piqued your interest in automatons? If you’re looking for a great STEM project to do with kids, there are kits you can buy to make your own wooden automatons. Or, you can read about them in books like these:

The Boneshaker by Kate Milford

This book has lots of gears and lots of creepiness. 13-year-old Natalie lives in a small Missouri town in the early 1900s where she loves tinkering on automatons and riding the very fast bicycle her father built for her (the boneshaker). When a traveling medicine show arrives in town, Natalie is intrigued by its perpetual motion automatons. But the show has also brought something sinister, and Natalie seems to be the only who can stop it before it’s too late.

The Clockwork Three by Matthew J. Kirby

This book has three main characters whose stories become intertwined. Frederick is an apprentice clockmaker in an American steampunk city in the late 1800s. He needs a head to finish off the body of the automaton he’s made. Together with Giuseppe, a street musician, and Hannah, a maid, the three new friends find the perfect head for Frederick’s automaton and bring it to life.

Cogheart by Peter Bunzl

Cogheart is set in a steampunk version of Victorian London. Lily and her fox automaton, Malkin, set off on a search to find Lily’s missing father, a genius inventor. They are joined by the son of a clockmaker as they all try to stay one step ahead of creepy silver-eyed men. The book is full of mystery as well as fun inventions like steam-powered zeppelins.

The Fate in the Box by Michelle Lovric

In this fantasy version of Venice in the late 1700s, automatons perform most tasks for the idle wealthy. It’s the job of the poor to wind up the automatons every night while the rich sleep. The city is ruled by Fogfinger, who uses his knowledge of clockwork to spy on citizens and keep them in line. As part of his reign of terror, every year, one Venetian child is chosen to meet the Fate in the Box, an automaton which decides if they live or die. This year, a few children band together to put an end to Fogfinger once and for all. This is the fourth of Lovric’s series of novels set in Venice that begins with The Undrowned Child.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick

You won’t find a book with more automatons than this one. It’s pretty much stuffed from basement to attic with them…literally. The main character in this beautifully illustrated novel lives in a Paris train station in the 1930s where he keeps the station’s clocks running. One day he finds an old automaton in the ruins of a museum inside the station and tries to fix it. The automaton is based on a real automaton called “The Writer” and many of the details of the book are inspired by the life of Georges Méliès, a pioneering filmmaker who used automatons in his live shows and movies.

A.M.’s bio: 
A.M. Morgen comes from a long line of engineers and researchers but chose to pursue literature over the laboratory. To her family’s surprise, she has managed to make a decent living as an editor with her English degree. In her spare time, A.M. enjoys taking long walks in the forest, trying out new hobbies (then abandoning them), and complaining about her mean cat. Despite what you may think, A.M. is not a morning person.

To be eligible to win a copy of “The Inventors at No. 8”, please leave a comment below!

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