Jennifer Swanson - STEM Tuesday

  Squeezing It In When you spend several years researching a topic, you end up with reams and reams of phenomenal facts. How are you ever supposed to cram it all in to one short book? Well, for starters, you don’t. Instead, you get choosy about what info you use, only opting for facts that support the main point of your book, but also, you get creative with ways to squeeze information in. Let’s take a look at how writers, illustrators, and design teams use the edges to educate. By edges, I mean all of that extra information frequently found in a nonfiction book. Information in the epitext: backmatter, front matter, cover, footnotes, sidebars. captions, etc. We nonfiction nerds have awesome options that fiction folks don’t often play with. Now, an author or an illustrator is not always in charge (many of those decisions are made on the publisher’s end), but we can be strategic in our use of epitext....

Paul Revere’s famous cry “The British are coming!” warned residents of Lexington and Concord of the imminent danger of British invasion. Right? The Titanic was touted as “unsinkable” before its ill-fated maiden journey. Right? Well, not exactly. The stories we’ve been told about historical events have been skewed by the fact that most were written from a single perspective. And no event has EVER had only one perspective.  That’s why I’m so excited that author Kate Messner is writing a new series for middle-grade readers called History Smashers. Before we talk about the books, though, let’s talk a bit more about this notion of  the “single story narrative.” Last fall, while walking my daily two-mile neighborhood loop, I listened to author Linda Sue Park discuss her book PRAIRIE LOTUS with Matthew Winner on The Children’s Book Podcast. In the podcast, she talked about the “single story narrative” and about how...

This STEM Tuesday’s theme is on the ecology of polar regions—from animals and plants that find ways to survive in their extreme environment to deep sea creatures and melting polar ice to the scientists that study these frozen parts of the world. From the Arctic to Antarctica, life may be difficult, but it still thrives and clearly reflects our rapidly changing environment. Here are some books and activities you can use in the classroom to help students learn about this unique environment and why it is so important. Ice: Chilling Stories From a Disappearing World,  by Laura Buller, Andrea Mills, and John Woodward A browsable book that ranges from the prehistoric to present. Meet polar plants, frozen frogs, and other wonders of the icy world. Plenty of climate change alerts sprinkled throughout the pages   Classroom activity: Prehistoric animals (like wooly mammoths, wool rhinos, and cave bears) have all been...

You may need to pull on a pair of fuzzy wool socks and heat up a cuppa cocoa before reading these books. Get ready for some armchair adventures into the frozen polar regions. Polar Environments Polar Worlds, by Wade, Rosalyn. The first half introduces the polar environment and highlights things explorers need to stay alive. The second half focuses on animals in the north and south polar regions, from puffins to penguins.       Ice: Chilling Stories From a Disappearing World,  by Laura Buller, Andrea Mills, and John Woodward A browsable book that ranges from the prehistoric to present. Meet polar plants, frozen frogs, and other wonders of the icy world. Plenty of climate change alerts sprinkled throughout the pages.       Climate Change and the Polar Regions, by Michael Burgan. An introduction shows how scientists study climate. Following chapters focus on the impacts of climate change to...