Plants

Hello, and welcome back to STEM Tuesday! I’m Stephanie.

My brain is still in April… I keep thinking about the mysterious intersection of nature and writing. Which identity comes first, the writer or the naturalist? Surely, not all naturalists are writers, and not all writers are naturalists. But where the intersection exists, what’s the cause? Do people first love nature, and that gives birth to their inner writers—or, because of and through their inborn writerly tendencies, do they appreciate nature? “Unanswerable” questions like this one are often very productive for young thinkers, bringing up concepts including correlation vs. causation and nature vs. nurture. If the admittedly dichotomous question isn’t flawed to begin with, the answers are personal anyway—and for me at least, maybe rooted in childhood exploring, reading, and writing. After all, exploring nature is not just something we do in a forest or park; it also happens on the page.

That said, if you haven’t yet, take a look at the books we’re featuring this month and, if you teach, classroom ideas. Today I’ll focus on writing tips and resources.

Writing Exercise: Invent a Cool Plant

One of my earliest memories of world-building was deciding that basketballs should grow on plants. As an adult, maybe that sounds like an impossible premise. But what if it weren’t impossible—what then? I imagined a forest with basketball-hoop trees and basketball bushes. I thought about what the insides of the balls contained (are they fruits?), and how they would have developed to self-inflate? Or maybe they grew deflated, like heavy-duty, rubbery balloons, and you had to pick them and blow them up? My 10-year-old mind was enthralled by the possibilities writing fiction offered.

Last week, Carla suggested the classroom activity of designing a deadly plant. This time, design a plant that sparks joy for you. It doesn’t have to be truly possible; it just has to be thinkable. If you can think of it, explore it.

• • What purpose does the plant serve in its environment?
  • How did the plant evolve, and what are its defense mechanisms?
  • What are its ideal soil conditions—or is it epiphytic (an “air plant”)?
  • If this plant were to really exist one day, maybe 2,000 years from now, which existing plants might contribute genetics?
  • What does it look like, smell like, taste like, and how have these factors impacted its evolution?

To read more about facts as fantasy seeds, revisit this post.

Writing Exercise: Making Facts Sticky!

For this non-fiction exercise, pick a plant to gather information about. Write down at least five things you already know about the plant, especially the most basic, common things. Got it? Great! Now it’s time to make those facts memorable—what Chip and Dan Heath call “sticky.” If you haven’t read their book Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, this will be a brief introduction.

What goes into memorability? The Heath brothers say there are six main components: simplicity, unexpectedness, concreteness, credibility, emotions, and stories. For example, keeping your facts simple means depending on things that readers already know, rather than overexplaining. Unexpectedness is important generally, even more so for kidlit audiences. Concreteness is physicality, something immediately evocative.

I’ve chosen roses as my example. Here’s one fact that’s not very memorable or interesting: “Mini roses can be as small as ¼ of an inch in diameter.” That’s great—but how small is that, in real life? Using comparisons can help by depending on ratios that readers already know. Here are some rewritten versions of the same fact:

• Mini roses can be as small around as #2 pencil erasers.
• Mini roses can be as small around as shirt buttons.
• Mini rose buds can be smaller than a dime.
• Mini rose buds can be smaller than an earbud.
• Mini rose buds can be smaller than a piece of O-shaped cereal.

Each of them is better than the original, but the best version depends on your intended audience, down to whether it’s a grade school kid or a teenager. I like the last option the best. The cereal seems the most accurate, most immediately evocative, most familiar to kids, and maybe even somewhat emotional—kids love food! My second favorite is the earbud comparison.

For your own exercise, which plant did you choose, and what comparisons did you come up with? Whether you’re writing with kids, or for kids, I hope this has been productive for you. You may also like this origami plants book I came across for kids. Adding a kinesthetic element to lessons always seems to help with stickiness, in my opinion.

Thanks for reading. See you soon.

A nature-loving creative, Stephanie Jackson writes poems, articles, picture books, and middle-grade novels. Her nonfiction has been published in Cricket magazine and her poems have been published in various literary journals including Dirigible Balloon, Tiny Seed, Cosmic Daffodil, and Touchstones, where she’s been a contributing poetry editor. Professional affiliations include the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators (SCBWI) and The Authors Guild. She graduated from Utah Valley University in April 2025 with an undergraduate English creative writing degree. You can find her online at StephanieWritesforKids.com and on Goodreads.