Posts Tagged craft

STEM Tuesday– Tiny Worlds (Microscopic/Nanotech)- In the Classroom

By on July 16, 2019   /   Common Core & NGSS, STEM Tuesday, Tiny Worlds/Microscopic/Nanotech  

This month’s STEM Tuesday theme revolves around the small, the tiny, and the microscopic—from nanotechnology to microorganisms. Microbes and fungus may be small, but their effects in the world are far from that. They are vital to Earth’s complex, constantly cycling systems, which range from microscopic to monumental. What could microbes do? Try this activity in the classroom to help students understand how microorganisms can have big effects.

 

Yeast + Sugar Balloon Experiment

Student Prep

Read through Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes by Nicola Davies and It’s a Fungus Among Us: The Good, the Bad & the Downright Scary by Carla Billups and Dawn Cusick as a class. Then tell students that microbes are in everything from the soil to our bodies to even our food. Explain that they will be doing a microbial experiment using yeast (a microorganism that is a member of the fungi kingdom). Then distribute materials to groups of students.

Tiny Creatures: The World of Microbes by Nicola Davies

This book is perfect for the curious kid who wants to know how microbes work. All around the world—in the sea, in the soil, in the air, and in your body—there are living things so tiny that millions could fit on an ant’s antenna. They’re busy doing all sorts of things, from giving you a cold and making yogurt to eroding mountains and helping to make the air we breathe.

It’s a Fungus Among Us: The Good, the Bad & the Downright Scary by Carla Billups and Dawn Cusick

All about Fungus! Who wouldn’t want to read this book? In It’s a Fungus Among Us, you’ll meet the wild group of organisms that can turn ants into zombies and eat trillions of pounds of feces every day. They’re not all gross though, these are the same types of organisms that make cheese stretchy, add sour tastes to candy, and make bread rise!

 

Materials

  • empty clear water bottle
  • yeast packet
  • balloon (stretched out by inflating a few times)
  • warm water
  • 1 tsp. sugar

Steps

  1. Have students empty the yeast packet into the water bottle. Then tell them to pour some of the warm water inside. Students should move the bottle a bit to mix the yeast and water.
  2. Ask students to stretch the balloon over the water bottle opening and observe what happens in the next 5 minutes. They should record their observations.
  3. Next have students carefully remove the balloon. Tell them to add 1 tsp. sugar to the bottle and mix. Students can now put the balloon back over the bottle opening.
  4. Have students observe the mixture and the balloon over the next 20 minutes. They can record their observations ever 5 minutes.

Conclusion

As the yeast consumes the sugar in the warm water mixture, the microbes produce gas that inflates the balloon at the top of the bottle. Tell students that this process is called fermentation, which is a process used to make all kinds of foods that we eat. Bread becomes light and airy due to fermentation. Milk turns into yogurt or kefir because of fermentation. The fermentation process also helps humans and animals digest food. This is just one of the many examples of how microbes affect us on Earth.

 

Need more ideas for teaching middle-school students about microbes? Check out these resources:

  • BioEd Online, Science Teacher Resources from Baylor College of Medicine, Microbes
    This site has 12 lessons to help students investigate microbes related to health (bacteria, fungi, protists, and viruses). Students will learn that microbes have important roles in humans, and that some help while others cause diseases. http://www.bioedonline.org/lessons-and-more/lessons-by-topic/microorganisms/microbes/
  • Microbiology Society, Microbe Passports
    Students can check out a virtual microscope on this site to study different microbes—from Bifidobacterium (which lives in human intestines) to Geobacter metallireducens (a metal-eating microbe that lives in muddy riverbeds).
    https://microbiologyonline.org/students/microbe-passports-1
  • Science News for Students, The dirt on soil
    Read all about the microbes in soil on this online science news publication site run by the Society for Science and the Public. It includes a glossary of “Power Words,” links for further reading, and a downloadable wordfind worksheet.
    https://www.sciencenewsforstudents.org/article/dirt-soil

 

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Karen Latchana Kenney loves to write books about animals, and looks for them wherever she goes—from leafcutter ants trailing through the Amazon rain forest in Guyana, where she was born, to puffins in cliff-side burrows on the Irish island of Skellig Michael. She especially enjoys creating books about nature, biodiversity, conservation, and groundbreaking scientific discoveries—but also writes about civil rights, astronomy, historical moments, and many other topics. Her award-winning and star-reviewed books have been named a YALSA Quick Pick for Reluctant Readers, a 2015 Book of Note from the TriState Review Committee, a 2011 Editor’s Choice for School Library Connection, and Junior Library Guild selections. She lives in Minneapolis with her husband and son, and bikes, hikes, and gazes at the night sky in northern Minnesota any moment she can.

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When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit Still Relevant

By on July 4, 2019   /   Curriculum Tie-in, For Librarians, For Parents, For Teachers  

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit

When beloved children’s book author Judith Kerr passed away in May at the age of 95, I’d been about two weeks into reading to my two sons her classic and still relevant middle-grade novel When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit.

This was a seminal book for me as a child: I read it over and over again and vividly remember parts of it to this day. I had great feelings—and memories— for the book, but never particularly thought about who wrote it. When I moved to London 25 years later however, I discovered that in fact its author, Judith Kerr, is the creator of some 30 picture books. This includes one of the most classic children’s books here in England: The Tiger Who Came to Tea which I had immediately fallen in love with.

Two Sequels

In that first year we lived in London, I made another surprising discovery, at least to me: When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit actually has two sequels—Bombs on Aunt Dainty which is more upper middle grade or possibly YA, and A Small Person Far Away, which I would also classify as YA or possibly even adult. They’re all fictionalized versions of Judith Kerr’s own story of being a refugee from Germany as Hitler came to power. 

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit starts when its main character, Anna, is nine, and ends when she is 11 going on 12, which is roughly my own age range when I read this book over and over again. Now an adult myself, it was fascinating to read the continuation of Anna’s life into adulthood. And in essence the three books together are a bildungsroman: the story of the artist as a young woman. But while I greatly enjoyed discovering and reading the two sequels, something held me back from re-reading When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit as an adult. I think I was probably afraid—what if it didn’t hold up to how I remembered it? And when considering a beloved childhood book to read to my kids there is always the extra risk of them hating it, not getting what’s so great about it, or finding it BORE-ING!

When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit Still Relevant

But the story in When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit, which was first published in 1971 and takes place in 1933-36, seems highly relevant right now and I sensed my sons were at a good age for it —at least to try. In any case, I needn’t have worried. The two boys, ages eight and ten, were enthralled. Every night they would literally beg me to read, and read more! In fact, the book not only holds up to how I remember it, but is even deeper.

There were several occasions on reading it—and not ones that I remembered from childhood—in which I was moved to tears. And reading the chapters each night with my sons provoked great questions and discussions. The story is not only so relevant now because of the refugee crisis, but it introduces children to Hitler coming to power and to anti-semitism—as well as the idea of racism—in a forthright and age-appropriate way. It “talks up” to them in a way that both the ten-year-old and the eight-year-old could handle and appreciate.

Pink Rabbit and Writing Craft

But it’s as a writer now myself that I marveled most.

Children's Book Still Relevant Today

I can’t find the cover image I remember from childhood but I adore this one from the edition I read with my sons

Judith Kerr expertly crafted When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit yet with the lightest of touches so it’s only now that I realize what a feat the book is.

She is telling the story of her life and her family’s experiences, but instead of it being a series of “this happened,” “and then this happened,” it is all harnessed to a cohesive story that has a beautiful narrative shape. She writes in an afterward that although she “filled in the gaps with invented detail” and was writing in the third person about a girl called Anna (because she felt that as a middle-aged English woman she was no longer the same little German girl that had fled the Nazis) she decided early on in the project “that all the important things must be true—the things that happened, how I felt about them, what we, our friends and the places we lived in were like.”

I have recently been reading many books on writer’s craft as I work on a major redrafting of my novel, and I am struck and awestruck at how Judith Kerr accomplished this. For one thing, there is an efficiency to each vignette so that no episode is random (even if it might delightfully seem that way at first) and each comes together in service of the greater story or theme—which is that Anna doesn’t feel like a refugee because as long as her family has stayed together that is her home.

For another thing, Judith Kerr has a way of mining the quiet moments for their drama and humor, while what is truly frightening or deeply upsetting (especially read through the eyes of an adult) are handled with a feather-weight dexterity so that they are not made light of but they are not so scary so as to no longer be appropriate for a children’s book. I think a lot of this comes down to her success at seeing everything through a child’s eye and staying true to that perspective. She doesn’t shy away from depressing moments, that sometimes one feels low, or that bad things happen. But through it all there’s a general positivity and the assurance of grown ups.

Overall, re-reading When Hitler Stole Pink Rabbit with my sons, I experienced both nostalgia for how I felt about it as a child, a re-ignition of my love for it, and an all-new feeling of admiration and aesthetic connection. It gave me great joy to read. I wish I could write like her! I will continue to study her novels and figure out just how she did it. Judith Kerr’s work is a huge inspiration to me and children’s literature is richer for her legacy.

 

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STEM Tuesday — Chemistry ROCKS! — Writing Tips & Resources

By on June 18, 2019   /   Chemistry, Common Core & NGSS, STEM Tuesday  

“CHEMISTRY! CHEMISTRY! CHEMISTRY!”

The crowd chants as the June sun sets on the western horizon. The emcee, DJ “Atom” Mick Orbitals, takes the stage to thunderous applause.

“Ladies and gentlemen…

ARE YOU READY TO ROCK?”

The crowd explodes with a roar like an alkali metal added to water. 

 

“Welcome to the Chemistry Rocks Summer World Tour 2019! Let’s rock!”

By https://pxhere.com/es/photo/41796 via Wikimedia Commons.

STEM Tuesday fans, sit back, relax with your favorite chemically enhanced or brewed beverage and enjoy the show.

Chemistry Rocks!

It really does. Qualitative, quantitative, organic, bio, physical, whatever or whichever, they all rock the scene. From the twitch of a muscle to the Fourth of July fireworks display to the explosion of the LH2 (liquid hydrogen) fuel that propels a rocket into space toward Mars, chemistry is there. Reaction after reaction after reaction occurring all around us every microsecond of every day. Sight, smell, taste, touch (If you think about it, we can also technically go with sound when we consider the neurochemistry involved in processing a sound wave) are all affected by chemistry.

Chemical Fun!

Don’t throw your shoe at me! I realize not everyone has had a positive experience with chemistry. I understand. I’ve been there. The struggle was real. I was only able to dig myself out of a “D” hole in high school chemistry because of the additions I was able to add to my science teacher’s herpetological and ichthyological collections for extra credit on the biology side of his classroom. I washed out of Chemistry 101 as an immature, baseball-playing freshman in college and it took three full semesters to dig out of that hole in my transcript.

Chemistry is hard. It’s one of those sciences that is like a completely foreign language. Like the Tower of Babel, one can be confused, frustrated, and want to throw a shoe at that one person who tries to tell you that chemistry is fun. As with language, once you learn the basics, begin to understand the meanings of the words, and learn to navigate those foreign roads, a whole new world opens up. With chemistry comes a new understanding of the world around us and how it operates. We are able to drive our existence toward a better life.

And where else can you perform experiments where colors change, states of matter are shifted, and there’s a potential for explosions?

Celebrate the Periodic Table! 

In 1869 Mendeleev proposed the first periodic table of elements. That makes the periodic table 150 years old! In my opinion, it looks just a fresh and vibrant at 150 as it did in it’s 20s. Maybe even better! I guess some things get better with age, right? I’ve always marveled at the beauty of the periodic table. Well, I marveled when I finally gave in, buckled down and learned the basics of the periodic table. The periodic table is a masterpiece. Just as The Beatles had Sgt. Pepper’s, DaVinci the Mona Lisa, Michaelangelo his sculpture of David, chemistry has the periodic table.

Happy Birthday, Periodic Table!

Better Life

Chemistry has made life better.

I’m sitting on my back patio as I write this section. It’s a beautiful early June Saturday morning. Chemistry surrounds me.

  • I see the cat eating his store-bought cat food, which has been optimized through a blend of macro and micronutrients. In other words, chemistry.
  • There’s the gardener table I built from my kids’ old wooden swingset that both got a recent coat of water sealant. Chemistry.
  • The house paint. Chemistry.
  • The cement of the patio. Chemistry.
  • The flowers and vegetables in pots and in the garden which were recently fertilized with BR-61. Chemistry.
  • I just ate a bowl of rice cereal made from a chemistry-based recipe. The peanut butter on my toast is loaded with chemistry. Heck, even the toasting of the bread by electrical heating elements in a closed chamber is chemistry.
  • I’m working at a steel patio table painted with a rust deterrent coating while typing on a laptop that relies on rare earth metals. Tell me that’s not some amazing chemistry!

I could go on and on but the point is this:

We are surrounded by chemical marvels every second of every day.

Chemistry makes our lives better.

Dark Side

There’s little argument as to the benefits chemistry brings to society. But to everything good, there’s always a dark side. The dark side of chemistry often is a result of our attempts to develop a fix to one particular problem without consideration of the entire ramification spectrum. Pesticides that are also potent carcinogens. Pharmaceutical chemicals with side effects that almost override the positive effects or cause addiction. Chemical weapons.

I could go on with examples of chemistry gone wrong but the point remains we need to be more vigilant with the power of chemistry. The current and future generations of chemists need to design chemical solutions with an eye to the long-term effects and cost-benefit of the solution. This particular solution may work to solve the issue BUT what else does it do?

Writing With Chemistry

I was going to title this section, Writing Chemically, but had second thoughts about the unintended connotations associated with that title. Most writers would classify chemistry as something on the opposite end of the creative spectrum than writing. I understand but hear me out before launching the other shoe at my head.

An ionic bond forms between two oppositely charged atoms when an atom with the weaker force donates an electron to the atom with a stronger force. Covalent bonds form between two atoms when they share electrons to fill their outer orbitals. Hydrogen bonds are weaker bonds that form when the partial positive charge of the hydrogen is attracted to a negatively charged atom. When thinking about the interactions between story elements or characters, chemistry provides three good ways to explore these interactions and reactions.

Or how about using the principals of exothermic (heat released) and endothermic (heat absorbed) reactions to move the plot forward in your story? You can also think about character development in the structural terms of chemistry, primary structure, secondary structure, tertiary structure, and quaternary structure. All four structures contain the same basic bits; it’s a matter of increasing the complexity of the model.  

See? The principles of chemistry can help out the writer as well as the chemist. Another win for science!

By Thomas Shafee – Own work. Via Wikimedia Commons

Explore Chemistry!

Bottom line: Give chemistry a chance because it really does rock.

The benefits far outweigh the detriments.

The rewards in understanding the fundamentals of chemistry are well worth the failures, false starts, and frustrations of the learning process.

We are all a whole lot better off with chemistry than without (and it doesn’t even matter if we don’t understand a lick of the science behind it).

Chemistry Rocks!

Now go enjoy the show.

By Ian T. McFarland from Los Angeles, USA via Wikimedia Commons.

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 Putting 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

The Out Of Left Field (O.O.L.F.) Files this month take a look at close look at chemistry from all angles, from industry to academics to studying for med school. Plus, what’s a look at how Chemistry ROCKS! without a look at the chemistry of rocks?

 

 

 

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