Posts Tagged craft

STEM Tuesday — Earth Day 50th Anniversary Celebration– In the Classroom

By STEM Tuesday on April 14, 2020 / Earth Day, STEM Tuesday

It’s interesting that we’re celebrating Earth Day’s 50th anniversary in the midst of a pandemic that has much of the world shut down. As I write this post, my state is under a Stay-At-Home order, and has been for a while. While COVID-19 has been devastating for people, in a way, it’s been a gift to the Earth. With people taking a step back from their daily hustle and bustle, the Earth has breathed easier, and animals have felt safe to come out of hiding. Before the world restarts, it’s a good time to step back and take a look at our relationship with the Earth.

The books on this month’s list cover a wide range of topics, from inspiring environmental activists…

One Earth: People of Color Protecting Our Planet
by Anuradha Rao
With stars from Kirkus and Publishers Weekly, this book profiles twenty environmental activists of color from around the world. Their individual stories show how they went from kids who cared about the environment to leaders in their communities.

Friends of The Earth: A History of American Environmentalism with 21 Activities
by Pat McCarthy
A collection of inspiring stories about the women and men who had the foresight to preserve Yosemite, Mt. Ranier, the Grand Canyon, and the Florida Everglades. Through these stories, young readers form a picture of American environmentalism and conservation. McCarthy helps kids act with 21 eco-activities.

…to understanding the complexities surrounding environmental policy…

Eyes Wide Open: Going Behind the Environmental Headlines
by Paul Fleischman
This Green Earth Book Award title offers a wake-up call for middle-grade and young adult readers as they try to make sense of the flood of environmental news. Readers discover there is more at work than merely wanting to help — money, politics, history, and psychology are all connected.

…to things you can do in your everyday life to help the Earth.

Human Footprint: Everything you will Eat, Use, Wear, Buy, and Throw Out in Your Lifetime
by Ellen Kirk
A powerful visual tool from Ellen Kirk and NatGeo that helps kids visualize the extent of their consumption. Did you know we each consume 13,056 pints of milk; take 28,433 showers; and eat 12,888 oranges, 14,518 candy bars and buy $52k,972 of clothes in our lifetime?

Generation Green: The Ultimate Teen Guide to Living An Eco-Friendly Life
by Linda Sivertsen
Sure, we want to be eco-friendly, but how do we accomplish that? Siversten offers dozens of tips on how to shop, dress, eat, and travel with a lighter carbon footprint.

Even if you are quarantined and don’t have easy access to these books, you can still dig in to some activities that celebrate Earth Day.

Research How COVID-19 is Helping and Hurting the Environment

Practice your internet searching skills to find out how the COVID-19 pandemic is impacting the environment. (Be sure to look for reliable sources of information.) In some ways, it seems to be helping. Air quality has improved dramatically in many areas due to the lack of cars on the road. In other ways, it may be hurting. A lot of recycling has been suspended because of the Stay-At-Home orders. How else is the pandemic helping or hurting the environment?

On a more personal note, think about how you are living right now. What things are you doing (or not) that are beneficial to the environment? Are you doing anything that is more harmful?

Take Action In Your Own Life

Very few of us live a life that doesn’t impact the environment in negative ways. Often times, we don’t even think about how what we’re doing affects the Earth. One of the best gifts we can give to celebrate Earth Day is to make changes in our own lives to be more environmentally friendly.

To start, you need to be aware of how you impact the Earth. Take a look at how you use resources. You can make it simple or you can track your usage over a period of time – a week or two or even a whole month. Resources to look at include food, water, fuel (including gas for your car and energy for your house), clothing and other items.

Here are some questions to help you think about how you live.

How many resources do you use? How much of each?
Where do your resources come from?
How much do you waste?
What do you do with resources when you are done with them?

Once you’ve taken a look at how you use resources, think about things you can change to live a more environmentally friendly life. Here are some examples.

If you notice a lot of your food is being transported from across the country or world, commit to getting more of your food from local farms. Look into participating in a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture).

How much of the food you buy gets thrown away? Think of ways to reduce your food waste. In our family, that often includes planning meals for a week and having leftover nights to eat food that didn’t get eaten the day it was cooked. You can also look into composting. Instead of throwing out potato peels and apple cores, throw them in a compost bin. Use the resulting compost to improve the quality of soil in your gardens.

Do you throw out clothes when you are done with them? If so, look into alternatives. You can pass them along to a friend or relative. There are also lots of opportunities to donate them to charities. You can even hold a clothing drive where you can help people recycle their clothing and earn money for a school or service organization.

There are lots of resources that can help you find ways to live a more Earth-friendly life. This includes several of the books on this month’s list.

Help Your Favorite Animal

Perhaps you’d like to do something further afield. What’s your favorite wild animal? Do some research. Where does it live? What environmental issues does it face? Are there charitable organizations that are working to help these animals? Once you know what issues there are, you can come up with some ways to help.

Perhaps that means donating to an organization dedicated to helping that animal. To help even more, ask for people to donate to that organization rather than giving you birthday presents. Or run a fundraiser to collect money to donate.

Maybe you can participate in a citizen science project that will help the animal. Enlist your friends and family, too. Here are a few resources that can help you investigate what citizen science activities are out there:

https://www.citizenscience.gov
https://www.nationalgeographic.org/idea/citizen-science-projects
https://www.nwf.org/Educational-Resources/Wildlife-Guide/Understanding-Conservation/Citizen-Science

No matter what you’re doing these days, I hope you’ll take some time to celebrate the Earth. Wishing you, your family, and the Earth peace and good health.

*************************************

Janet sometimes helps out with conservation projects – here she’s helping cut reeds to stock an insect hotel.

Janet Slingerland loves learning about science, history, nature, and (well) everything, which she then turns into a book. She has spent many hours helping out on environmental projects, including transforming her yard into a native plant oasis (a work in progress). To find out more about Janet and her books, check out her website: janetsbooks.com

STEM Tuesday– Astronauts and Space Travel — Writing Tips & Resources

By STEM Tuesday on March 24, 2020 / Astronauts and Space Travel, STEM Tuesday

Behind the Scenes

Astronauts are awesome, don’t get me wrong. They’re like the quarterback of aeronautics and space exploration. They’re the face of the mission just as the quarterback is the face of the football team. But I’m a lineman. Linemen do the work in the trenches that keeps the quarterback on track for success. Space travel requires an army of men and women working in the trenches in order to make a mission successful and bring their astronauts home safe and sound.

Curiosity Science Laboratory Mission Operations Team

I was full of wonder as only a newly-minted five-year-old birthday boy can be when I saw the Eagle land on the moon in July of 1969. That sense of wonder never left me but years later I got to thinking deeper about this life-changing event. Sure we all watched Neil Armstrong take one small step but what about the thousands of people working behind the scenes to make it possible? From the spacesuit to the landing pads to the camera to the experiments to the engineers who made a flagpole that would stick in the lunar surface, those thousands of people made those short, historic minutes possible.

Curiosity EDL Team NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab

Your STEM Tuesday mission this month?

Drill down into a system. Study it. Look at the purpose, the plan, the participants, and the place. It can be a human-engineered system, like NASA’s Mars Curiosity Lander Mission, the International Space Station, a zoo, a factory, a sports team, a library, a school, or it can be a natural system like a pond, anthill, beehive, or wolf pack. Any system will do.

Curiosity Women of Mars Scientists

As I was preparing this piece, we experienced a historical event with the COVID-19 coronavirus global pandemic designation by the World Health Organization. That, coupled with the infections ravaging Italy, kicked in a new, and hopefully short, shift in life for most of us. Social distancing, flattening the curve, epidemiology, supply chain economics, and shelter-in-place have all become new words in most of our vocabularies.

The global systems in place to search for these emerging infectious diseases and react might be a good system to start. The World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), and your state and local health departments are all good systems to study during the time of learning in place. It might also help kids, parents, teachers, and their families better understand the health systems in place and how these systems work for our safety.

STEM Tuesday enthusiasts, jump in on a system that fills you with wonder and then look behind the scenes. Drill down, dig deep, observe the inner workings with a fine-toothed comb. Keep a notebook or journal to document your journey. Use text, pictures, drawings, or whatever it takes to figure out what’s happening under the hood of your system. Feel free to share your discoveries in the comments below or by adding a link there.

Stay SAFE!

Stay informed!

Stay engaged with the life around you.

Stay STEM!

Mike Hays has worked hard from a young age to be a well-rounded individual. A well-rounded, equal opportunity sports enthusiasts, that is. If they keep a score, he’ll either watch it, play it, or coach it. A molecular microbiologist by day, middle-grade author, sports coach, and general good citizen by night, he blogs about sports/training related topics at www.coachhays.com and writer stuff at www.mikehaysbooks.com. Two of his science essays, The Science of Jurassic Park and Zombie Microbiology 101, are included in the P utt ing the Science in Fiction collection from Writer’s Digest Books. He can be found roaming around the Twitter-sphere under the guise of @coachhays64.

The O.O.L.F Files

This month’s Out Of Left Field (O.O.L.F.) takes a look at systems. Everything from NASA to pandemics to insect colony organization. Click a link or two or three, or heck, click them all! Enjoy!

Go by Public Broadcasting System

This is one of my favorite music videos and a top 50 Mike Hays song. It does a nice job of showing the behind the scenes of Apollo 11 moon landing riding along with a really awesome tune.

Novel Coronavirus 2019: Scientist Roundtable at the Science in SF blog

I had the privilege of being part of a blog roundtable recently with some really sharp people to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic. If you are looking for some answers to your questions or just want to know more, check it out.

More COVID-19 Questions? Here’s a great list of resources with information you can trust.

Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center
- Check out their interactive map for the latest data.
World Health Organization (WHO)
Center for Disease Control (CDC)
Kansas Department of Health and Environment (KDHE)

Inside the Ant Colony, a TEDed lesson

How Do Honeybees Get Their Jobs? | National Geographic

Unwrapped

This is still one of my favorite Food Network shows. It made the foodie and the scientist sides of me very happy.

And finally, since we are talking about food…

Top 10 Most Amazing Automatic Food Processing Machines

https://youtu.be/pEdY7GpFYL8

Bon appetit!

STEM Tuesday– The Human Body — Writing Tips & Resources

By STEM Tuesday on February 18, 2020 / Human Body, STEM Tuesday

STEM Tuesday CoSTEM Costume Contest

A Place for Primary Sources

Reading the books on this month’s booklist, the following quote from Carla Mooney’s HUMAN MOVEMENT: How the Body Walks, Runs, Jumps, and Kicks jumped out at me:

“Primary sources come from people who were eyewitnesses to events. They might write about the event, take pictures, post short messages to social media or blogs, or record the event for radio or video. Why are primary sources important? Do you learn differently from primary sources than from secondary sources, which come from people who did not directly experience an event?” (p 41)

What a great question! Nonfiction authors typically use a mix of both primary sources and secondary sources (which are created after an event and often summarize and synthesize primary sources) in their books. And this month’s booklist provides fodder for a rich discussion about primary sources and how they are used in narrative and expository nonfiction.

Primary sources in narrative STEM nonfiction

Young writers may have more experience with primary sources in narrative nonfiction. These sources may include government documents, letters, diaries, and newspapers from a specific period.

For a good example of how authors use primary sources in narrative nonfiction, look at Catherine Reef’s FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE: The Courageous Life of the Legendary Nurse, a biography of Florence Nightingale. The book itself is a secondary source. Reef wasn’t alive more than a hundred years ago when Nightingale lived. Instead, Reef’s book analyzes and synthesizes several sources including primary sources, and she identifies these sources in the bibliography. They include Nightingale’s collected writings, her letters from Egypt, and her notes on hospitals and nursing. Can you find others?

Authors use primary sources in narrative writing for many reasons. First, they reveal a character’s opinions, feelings, and inner thoughts. For example, using Nightingale’s own writings, we hear her say, “Why have women passion, intellect, moral activity – these three – and a place in society where no one of the three can be exercised?” (pp 5-6) You can tell from this quote that Nightingale wasn’t impressed with the typical gender roles assigned to women of the 1800s.

Primary sources also provide sensory details only first-hand observers might know. Reef quotes the cleric Sydney Osborne, who worked with Nightingale in a field hospital saying Nightingale had “‘a face not easily forgotten … pleasing in its smile, with an eye betokening great self possession, and giving when she wishes, a quiet look of firm determination in every feature.’” (Prologue) Unless we had a photograph of Nightingale, this description may give us the only information we have about how she looked. For writers, such detailed descriptions of characters, settings, and events provide the building blocks for writing scenes. And writing in scenes is how we make a book come alive for readers.

Activity

Look at the bibliography of FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE. What primary sources you can identify? The names of the authors, as well as the publication dates, might give you clues. You can look at the notes (just before the bibliography) to get more information.

Primary Sources in Expository STEM Nonfiction

When writing about scientific topics, authors use primary sources too, though their purposes might be different from narrative writers. Primary sources for science books include interviews with scientists, data from experiments, theses, specimens, lab notes, technical reports, patents, and some scientific journal articles if they describe original science research.

Let’s look again at Carla Mooney’s HUMAN MOVEMENT: How the Body Walks, Runs, Jumps, and Kicks again. Now turn to pages 93-94 and look for the PS icon. How does using information from the University of Texas scientists’ research add to your understanding of the topic?

In science writing, primary sources provide the most current information. This is especially critical since new evidence and discoveries in science upend old ideas all the time. When I was growing up, I didn’t learn that dinosaurs had feathers and are related to birds. Imagine if an author used a textbook from my childhood as a source for information about dinosaurs! They’d get things all wrong. Current information is critical.

Fortunately, primary sources like science journals are published several times a year whereas a science textbook may only be updated every few years. For their part, scientists read journals in their field and attend conferences with fellow researchers allowing them to keep up-to-date too. That’s why interviews with scientists can be a wonderful primary source.

As one of this month’s books puts it: “For now, enjoy learning about what we do know — and by the time you’ve finished reading, scientists may have learned something new!”

— THE BRAIN: The Ultimate Thinking Machine (Science Comics) by Tory Woollcott and Alex Graudins

For more fun, grab some more of this month’s titles, flip to the bibliography, and see what types of sources you can find. Then discuss what you think using primary sources added to the book.

Kirsten W. Larson used to work with rocket scientists at NASA. Now she writes books for curious kids. She’s the author of WOOD, WIRE, WINGS: EMMA LILIAN TODD INVENTS AN AIRPLANE, illustrated by Tracy Subisak (Calkins Creek, 2020), CECILIA PAYNE: MAKING OF A STAR (SCIENTIST), illustrated by Katherine Roy (Chronicle, Fall 2021), along with 25 other nonfiction books for kids. Find her at kirsten-w-larson.com or on Twitter/Instagram @KirstenWLarson.