Posts Tagged Giveaways

STEM Tuesday Cool Inventions and the People Who Create Them – Interview with author Mary Kay Carson

By on May 22, 2018   /   Author Interviews, Inventors / Inventions, STEM, STEM Tuesday  

Welcome to STEM Tuesday: Author Interview & Book Giveaway, a repeating feature for the fourth Tuesday of every month. Go Science-Tech-Engineering-Math!

Today we’re interviewing author Mary Kay Carson who wrote this month’s featured cool invention book, Alexander Graham Bell for Kids: His Life and Inventions 

Find out how Alexander Graham Bell invented not only the telephone, but also early versions of the phonograph, the metal detector, airplanes, and hydrofoil boats. This Scottish immigrant was also a pioneering speech teacher and a champion of educating those with hearing impairments, work he felt was his most important contribution to society. Bell worked with famous Americans such as Helen Keller and aviators Glenn Curtiss and Samuel P. Langley, and his inventions competed directly with those of Thomas Edison and the Wright Brothers.

May Kay’s books include  a number of titles in Houghton Mifflin Harcourt’s award-winning SCIENTISTS IN THE FIELD series, including  Park Scientists and The Bat Scientists, an ALA’s 2011 Notable Children’s Books for Middle Readers. Her book Exploring the Solar System was the 2009 recipient of the American Institute ofAeronautics and Astronautics Children’s Literature Award and the State Library of Ohio selected Beyond the Solar System as a CHOOSE TO READ OHIO book for 2015 & 2016. Visit her at marykaycarson.com  or on Twitter at @MaryKayCarson

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JAS: Thanks for joining us today, Mary Kay. This is a fabulous book! I love how you found such a unique trait to describe this historical figure. I mean, everyone knows that Alexander Graham Bell invented the telephone, but not many know why. Can you tell us how you discovered this fact? And also why you used it to create your whole book?

MKC: In today’s terms, we’d call Alexander Graham Bell a third-generation speech therapist. Bell’s father and grandfather worked with people trying to overcome speech impediments like stuttering or pronunciation struggles because of hearing impairments. Alexander Graham Bell was born into a family where the proper mouth position for making the sound of S was dinner table talk. Bell naturally went into this line of work, as well. Growing up with a mother who couldn’t hear gave him a deep understanding of both the isolation of the hearing impaired as well as a motivation for understanding how sound is made, transmitted, and perceived.

JAS: How did you come up with all of the activities? And why did you choose to add activities to your book?

MKC: I knew Alexander Graham Bell For Kids would include activities as a title in the Chicago Review Press “For Kids” series, all of which have 21 activities. It’s actually why I thought the book would be such a good fit for the series. Bell’s experiments, investigations, and inventions run the gamut from sound and light to flying machines and sheep genetics. The telephone invention alone lends itself to activities about electricity, sound, vibrations, and batteries. I’ve written four other books in this series with activities and Alexander Graham Bell For Kids was by far the easiest to come up with activities for. He was a wellspring of ideas.

JAS: The use of original sketches of Bell’s inventions are really great. How difficult was it to get permission to use them?

MKC: The Library of Congress has a huge Alexander Graham Bell archive, much of it digitized and in the public domain. It includes laboratory notebooks, invention blueprints, journals, personal letters, and photographs. It’s a real treasure trove of primary source material.

JAS: Why do you think learning about inventors is a so important for kids?

MKC: One of my favorite Bell quotes is: “The inventor is a man who looks around upon the world and is not contented with things as they are. He wants to improve whatever he sees, he wants to benefit the world.” To me, Bell’s description of an inventor actually describes young people in general. Most see the world as overdue for upgrades and improvements. Many have ideas on how to make things better, too. Being able to envision something different is the first step to inventing. Whether we’re talking about tackling a changing climate or designing a fun video game, it all starts with “What if…”

JAS: How would you suggest a teacher use your book in the classroom?

MKC: There are quite a few ways teachers can use the book in the classroom. The biography itself is instructive on how life experiences shaped the inventor that Bell became. The primary source material is cited and resources given for older kids who want to dig deeper into Bell’s life and legacy. Some of the activities in the book are simple enough for even kindergarteners to explore sound and light. Other activities are more open ended and challenge students to think of and execute an idea of their own.

Buy a Copy of the Alexander Graham Bell book

Praise for Alexander Graham Bell: “Many of the activities featured throughout the chapters, such as making an ear trumpet and feeling sound vibrations, use materials readers likely have at home, fairly easily giving them a taste of the devices used during Bell’s time and illustrating properties of sound. Avid readers can also pursue activities that require special purchases, such as seeing sound and making a pie-tin telegraph. Numerous black-and-white photographs of Bell and his family, period scenery, and artifacts immerse readers in the world of this prolific inventor, from his free-roaming childhood through his adulthood as a teacher of the deaf, an inventor many times over, and a family man. Children who enjoy exploring different symbolic communication codes, historical sciences, and inventions will find much to dig into in this detailed volume.

Thorough and well-rounded. (timeline, resources, glossary, notes, bibliography)”–Kirkus

 

Win a FREE copy of the Alexander Graham Bell book!   Enter the giveaway by leaving a comment below. The randomly-chosen winner will be contacted via email and asked to provide a mailing address (within the U.S. only) to receive the book.

Good Luck! 

Hosting this week is Jennifer Swanson, fellow science nerd, and author of Astronaut Aquanaut: How Space Science and Sea Science Interact and other nonfiction books for kids. @JenSwanBooks

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STEM Tuesday Field Work — Interview with Loree Griffin Burns

By on March 27, 2018   /   Author Interviews, Common Core & NGSS, Cross-Curricular, Curriculum Tie-in, Field Work, Giveaways, STEM Tuesday  

Welcome to STEM Tuesday: Author Interview & Book Giveaway, a repeating feature for the fourth Tuesday of every month. Go Science-Tech-Engineering-Math!

Today we’re interviewing author Loree Griffin Burns who wrote this month’s featured book about real-life scientific field work, Life on Surtsey: Iceland’s Upstart Island.

The book takes place on an Icelandic island that’s only decades old. Readers join the scientists studying this new patch of land and the plants and animals that are colonizing it. Loree Griffin Burns earned science degrees from Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the University of Massachusetts. Since then she’s been writing books and articles that celebrate our natural world and the people who study it. To research these stories, she’s beachcombed on both coasts, cruised the Pacific Ocean in search of plastic, surveyed birds in Central Park, stung herself with a honey bee, visited the Mexican wintering grounds of the monarch butterfly (on horseback!) and lived on a Costa Rican butterfly farm. Her latest book, Life on Surtsey: Iceland’s Upstart Island was named a 2017 best children’s nonfiction title by both Kirkus Reviews and School Library Journal. Loree lives with her husband and three nearly-grown children in central Massachusetts.

 Mary Kay Carson: How did this book come about?

Loree Griffin Burns: In the spring of 2014, I had the opportunity to travel with my husband to Iceland. While we were there, we took a day-trip to the island of Heimaey, which is the largest of an archipelago off the southwestern coast of the country. It poured rain the entire time we were on Heimaey, so we toured by bus instead of on foot. At one point, as we rounded the southern end of the island, our bus driver pulled to the side of the road and pointed out to sea. “You see that island?” he asked. “The furthest one out?” We squinted through rain-soaked bus windows to see the rock he was talking about. “That’s Surtsey,” he said, “and I stood on the very spot this bus is parked, when I was a boy, and watched as it was born.” I knew the moment he said this that I’d just heard something incredibly special. I took out a notebook and started taking notes on everything he said from that moment on, including the fact that Surtsey was closed to all but the Icelandic scientists studying its transformation from a seething hunk of lava to an island that supported living, breathing organisms. As soon as I was home again, I began to research Surtsey’s story and became convinced it was the perfect subject for a ‘Scientists in the Field’ book. Once I’d convinced my editor of it too, I wrote to the Surtsey Research Society, the organization that controls access to the island as a research site, and pitched the idea the them. I was thrilled when they sent back an invitation to join an expedition the following summer.

MKC: Would you like to share a favorite part of spending time in the field researching this book?

Loree: I spent one working week, Monday through Friday, on Surtsey, as part of an expedition that included ten other scientists. Eight of those were Icelandic, and one was a Polish botanist who was living and working in Iceland at the time. Our team consisted of three women and seven men. Some of my favorite moments were getting to know the people I was with. As you’ll see when you read the book, I spent the most time with entomologists Erling Ólafsson and Matthais Alfredsson. But I got to know some other fascinating people, too. One of my favorite mornings was the one I spent with Lovisa Ásbjörnsdóttir, a geologist who has spent a lot of time on Surtsey. We hiked Austurbunki and Westurbunki together, mountains formed from Surtsey’s two volcanic cones, and spent several delightful hours sharing our work, our homelands, and what drew us each to Surtsey. Another highlight that didn’t make it into the book was my exploration inside the island. Underneath the hard lava crust of Surtsey is a network of lava tubes—tunnels through which molten lava once flowed but which now snake, empty and exploreable, underground. When botanist Paweł Wąsowicz first mentioned them to me, I didn’t believe him. And once I realized they existed, I was very nervous about checking them out. But I did, and it was an unforgettable experience.

Purchase a copy of  Life of Surtsey! 

MKC: Do you have a STEM background?

Loree: I do. I spent my twenties in a research lab studying the expression of genes in yeast cells and earning a PhD in biochemistry. So, science has been part of my life for a long time. I tell kids all the time that for me, science is not a subject, or a career, but a way of looking at the world, a way of asking questions about how it works, and then figuring out how to find the answers.

MKC: Could you give us a peek into your process by sharing how you’re tackling a current project?

Loree: I recently finished a picture book manuscript for older readers about fruit flies and how scientists came to realize they are a useful organism for studying DNA. I know. I know. It doesn’t sound like proper picture book material, does it? But it really is! The focus is entirely on the flies themselves, their bodies, their life cycles, their strange and adorable (!) laboratory habits, their easy to manipulate DNA. I think the right illustrator could have a great time with this book. (If you know one, send them my way.) While I try to find the perfect publishing home for the fruit fly book, I am working on another insect book: The Moth Ball. Coming from Charlesbridge in 2020, this book is an invitation into the nighttime exploits of the lesser-loved cousin of the butterfly: the moth. Right now, I’m reading up on moths and moth identification, and sketching out ideas for how best to structure a book that will excite readers about studying the moths in their own neighborhoods. The second spring finally arrives here in New England, photographer Ellen Harasimowicz and I will start calling moths into our own yards, using black lights and special sugar baits, and we’ll begin recording every moment for our book. We’re both pretty excited! What you can see from these two examples is that my bookmaking process involves a lot more than just writing. I spend a lot of time researching my subjects, by reading the words of other writers and by having my own first-hand experiences with the topic. I also spend time getting my finished manuscripts into the hands of publishers who can help me bring them to readers. This variety is one of the things I like about making books.

MKC: Any recommendations for readers who loved Life on Surtsey?

Loree: Nonfiction books are my passion, and titles I’ve loved lately include: Isaac the Alchemist: Secrets of Isaac Newton, Reveal’d by Mary Losure; The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science by Joyce Sidman; Finding Wonders: Three Girls Who Changed Science by Jeannine Atkins; Seeing into Tomorrow: Haiku by Richard Wright, Illustrated by Nina Crews.

More about Life on Surtsey:

Win a FREE copy of  Life of Surtsey! Enter the giveaway by leaving a comment below. The randomly-chosen winner will be contacted via email and asked to provide a mailing address (within the U.S. only) to receive the book.

Good luck!

Your host this week is Mary Kay Carson, fellow nature geek, science nerd, and author of Mission to Pluto and other nonfiction books for kids.

 

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The Art of the Swap Interview and Giveaway

By on February 12, 2018   /   Author Interviews, For Librarians, For Teachers, Giveaways, New Releases  

Freaky Friday meets Downton Abbey in this middle grade mystery that features a modern day twelve-year-old switching bodies with a Gilded Age heiress in order to solve a famous art heist.

We are thrilled to have with us today Kristine Asselin and Jen Malone, authors of THE ART OF THE SWAP, which comes out tomorrow. I am gobsmacked to be able to report that Kris, Jen, and Simon & Schuster are giving to one reader of our blog an ENTIRE CLASSROOM OF HARD COVERS of this book! Can you believe that? It’s for classes in the U.S. only, and up to 25 books. To enter, leave a comment with your email address below by 5pm Eastern on Thursday. You can get an additional entry if you tweet about the giveaway (just leave a link to the tweet in your comment). If you aren’t a teacher, you can designate any school for the donation, or Jen and Kristine can suggest a worthy recipient.

What a fun story! Can you share with us the inspiration?

Kris: Thanks so much for having us here at the Mixed Up Files. We are so excited to have this book out in the world. We can’t wait for kids to read it!

The origin story: About four years ago, I was visiting Newport, Rhode Island, with my family. My daughter and my husband and I have always really enjoyed historical properties, and we tour them as often as we can. On this particular trip, we were on a guided tour and the tour guide pointed to a mysterious door as we walked by and said, “that’s the caretaker’s apartment.”

I turned to my daughter. “Wouldn’t it be cool to live here and take care of all of this?”

She replied, “That would be a great story, mom. You should write that.”

When I got home, I did a bit of research and found out that The Elms (the house in our story) had a real life caretaker who raised his daughter in the house. He’s still there, in fact. His name is Harold Matthews. I was immediately intrigued.

About a year later, Jen and I were carpooling to SCBWI New Jersey and got to talking about our works-in-progress. When I mentioned this middle grade idea of a caretaker’s daughter, we began to brainstorm. Through the course of our drive, it became this amazing dual voice, Freaky Friday, time travel story that we absolutely had to write together.

I love getting to see what it is like for girls from two different centuries, living in the same house. What kind of research did you do for the book? 

Jen: Kristine had a lot more experience doing research since she also writes nonfiction titles for the school/library market, but my fiction research to date had been more along the lines of “Where are all the penny press machines in NYC?” and “How much paper mache would it take to build a 50-foot hedgehog float,” so this was a new and welcome challenge for me. The best was our in-person research—we made visits to The Elms together and solo, and spent an amazing day trailing the caretaker, Harold Mathews, into spots not normally accessible to the public and listening to him speak about his adventures as a single dad raising his young daughter in the converted servant quarters-turned-caretaker apartment. That was magical insight we couldn’t have gotten from any textbook (though we relied on those plenty as well). Most fascinating to me was a mysterious opening ¾ of the way up a wall between the furnace rooms and the coal tunnel (pictured here). Harold told us they once filmed a Victoria’s Secret commercial in this space, but that in the 30-plus years he’s managed the property he’d never once investigated that space. Kris and I were dying to pull a ladder right up to it! Alas… he didn’t offer.

Kris: The Elms was a private home until the early 1960s when the Newport Preservation Society saved it from the wrecking ball and turned it into a museum. It’s still hard for me to believe that someone actually lived in the house, it’s so huge. It truly has its own story! It was one of the first properties saved from destruction by the Preservation Society—and today it looks a lot like it did in the early 1900s.

You can visit The Elms and tour it–so if you’re ever in Newport, you can actually see the places in the house where Hannah and Maggie live!

You two have created a fabulous Educators’ Guide for Art of the Swap that is Common Core-aligned for grades 4-7 and includes special activities for Women’s History Month. Can you tell us some about what you’ve included?

Jen: Thank you! Maggie’s character arc was always focused on the differences between how girls are treated in her time (1905) versus in Hannah’s modern day, but after participating in the Women’s March last year, we revised the manuscript to make some big changes to Hannah’s character arc that allow her to realize there are still many strides to be made in the fight for true equality. We’re hopeful the book can be a springboard to classroom conversation about this! Our Educator’s Guide offers several discussion points on this topic, as well as focused activities, such as a timeline of events in the women’s rights movement between the two time periods highlighted in the story. 

My daughter and I are in a book club together, and so I was thrilled to see the Activities Guide for Troops, Book Clubs, and Organizations, as well. What are some of those activities, and why did you decide to create that guide?

Jen: Both Kristine and I are moms to young girls (my daughter is eleven and Kristine’s is fifteen). As we took a deeper dive into feminism with this book, we were also doing the same in our personal lives. We wanted SWAP to be a starting point for discussions on equality, but we also hoped those discussions would lead to action. We created this Activities Guide for Young Activists to offer a script for ways tweens and teens could turn awareness into activism. We have a series of experiments kids can conduct to see where imbalances still present. For example, one has them watching commercials and tallying lines of dialogue and examining the roles in which women were cast. Did you know the average girl has seen 77,546 ads by the time she turns twelve and only 5% of those ads feature women without a man present? Men speak seven times as often as women in commercials and are 62% more likely to be shown in an intelligent role, such as doctor or scientist. From this awareness-building, we offer suggestions for concrete action steps to bring about change—with the idea that girls (and any boy allies who want to join in!) can do most of them in a fun group setting and benefit from that bonding time too. I think every author wants their stories to put more good into the world, even if that’s by simply offering a few hours of escape to our readers, but this book’s subject matter, coupled with our passion for the topic, really made us want to go bigger here! We’re including a sample exercise from the guide below, and it’s available for download on our author sites and on simonandschuster.net/books/the-art-of-the-swap. We’d love to contribute to the movement!

Can you describe the process of writing collaboratively? How did you share ideas and writing?

Kris: First and foremost, we were (and are!) both super excited about this story. Our love for our characters and the themes in the book really drove the process. Once we realized we were actually going to do this, we started by brainstorming most of the plot in one sitting back in August of 2015. We created a very detailed outline which included almost every detail of the plot. This was important because each of us were writing a different voice and character arc, so we needed to have an outline to keep us on track. Can you tell which girl each of us wrote?

As far as nuts and bolts, we had a shared Google Doc in which we wrote the whole story. We would meet (or talk on the phone) periodically to share ideas, but we each wrote our own parts.

Once we had the words in the Doc we could critique each other’s work and then revise. It worked out really well, I think!

We agree! Thanks, Kristine and Jen, for the interview. Now, dear reader, go enter to win all those awesome books!

Kate Hillyer wants to move to an old mansion in Newport, R.I. In the meantime, you can find her in our nation’s capitol, where she reads and writes middle grade, wrangles three kids, and is sure she’s going to start training for that 10k she signed up for any second now. She blogs here and at The Winged Pen, and is a Cybils judge for Poetry. She’s online at www.katehillyer.com and on Twitter as @SuperKate. 

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