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STEM Tuesday– Fossils– Writing Tips & Resources

By on January 21, 2025   /   Fossils, STEM Tuesday  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Welcome again to STEM Tuesday! I’m Stephanie.

When you’ve been writing for a long time, coming across an old piece of writing is like finding a fossil—it’s a record of a bygone era: incomplete, stripped of context, languishing unstudied. The metaphor breaks down eventually, because I’m no paleontologist, but you get the idea. We all have tidbits of stories that we’ve never completely unearthed, or found all the pieces of. And in that spirit, instead of generative prompts, today we have revision prompts!

Revision Prompt 1 | Dig, Discover, Excavate

Pickaxes and rock hammers ready? It’s time to revisit a piece of writing, something you haven’t looked at for a long time. Where do you keep these things? I have discarded notebooks, a drawer of ideas jotted on paper scraps, a list of odd facts, and files scattered on two computers. Wherever your archeological dig site, take a good look, skimming and rereading…

(Teachers, have students select excerpts from classroom journals or past assignments. Define a scope for your students… do you want them to revise a single sentence, a paragraph, a story idea?)

  1. Look for something that catches your eye, for whatever reason. Select a dusty piece but one that seems to say, “I have more to give.” Maybe you thought nothing of it when you wrote it, but now you’re not sure where it came from. It could be strange, or funny, dark-humored or sentimental. Mysterious. Playful. Whatever you like, but something you want to spend time on: something with a hook.
  2. For at least 10 minutes, do some exploratory writing, examining what you’ve found. What’s the size of your “fossil”

    Whale skeleton on sandy land in a desert. Picture by Rachel Claire. Used with permission.

    (writing sample)? What’s its nature? What do you like about it? What does the language do: nail an authorial tone that you like? perfectly capture a universal truth? Where did it come from, within you? answering these and the following questions. Does your fossil want to tell a fiction story, or a non-fiction one? What motivates you to excavate around it? What do you hope to find?

  3. Write down as many revision options for yourself as possible—and make them differ widely in scope, tone, and even genre. Think mash-ups. Think metaphors. Don’t edit your options. Go for variety.
  4. Next, discuss your revision ideas with someone else. If nobody is available, say them aloud anyway. Talk through them. Pick any two significantly different ideas and write them out for 10 minutes each.

If you feel exhausted, it’s well deserved. You dug. You discovered. You excavated. Congrats on your findings! Maybe you’ll continue to revise this piece, or maybe a year from now you’ll dig, discover, and excavate again. After all, the writing process sometimes feels paced like the geologic eras.

Revision Prompt 2 | Fragmented Storytelling

Fossils are seldom found complete. It’s more common to find fragments, and I find memory to be the same way. With creative nonfiction such as I’ve been writing lately for my undergrad classes, while the setting, characters, and events must be accurate, the license to embellish covers a good swath of gray area, such as story structure. Where memory fails, creative nonfiction offers artful transitions. Where historical gaps exist, the genre says, (since know it’s creative) give us approximations of the truth, renditions of it. Give us stories based on true stories.

Sometimes constructing context requires this sort of fragmented, non-linear, woven storytelling. It requires a rhetorical look at sequencing. If that’s something you like, maybe take a look at Marbles on the Floor: How to Assemble a Book of Poems by editors Sarah Giragosian and Virginia Konchan. It’s a compilation of essays about how to organize poems, but not-so-secretly, I think the methods for motif layering are similarly applicable to prose.

  1. Print both of your revisions from above, double spaced. You may want to print more than one copy each, since this exercise is about experimentation, and there’s always more than one way to revise a sentence. Cut your “fossil” into white strips of paper—individual words, phrases, entire sentences or paragraphs. Now piece these together like the bones of a skeleton. Create a new story using fragments. The story should become both and neither of the stories it was before.
  2. There’s no “wrong” way to do this exercise, but the important part is to break sentences in search of better sentences, to braid metaphors from each version, to look for surprises buried in the words that are already yours. Perhaps you wrote an entire paragraph that’s perfect as it is… almost. Can you substitute a better word from your other story? Alternate sentences. Try reversing parts of the story, or parts of the sentences. Where might sentence fragments do a better job of communicating than a whole sentence would?

How much fragmentation is too much fragmentation? That’s up to you and the story you’re telling. This is, after all, just an exercise. If your new piece feels too fragmented, adjust as necessary.

Do you still like the paleontology metaphor for writing? I’ll be posting some of my extra fossil-themed writing prompts on my website very soon!

All my best,

Stephanie

 

A nature-loving creative, Stephanie Jackson writes poems, articles, picture books, middle-grade novels, and more. Her nonfiction has been published in Cricket magazine and her poems have been published in The Dirigible Balloon and various literary journals including 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. This spring she’s graduating from Utah Valley University with her English degree, emphasis in creative writing. She interacts with the kidlit community on Twitter as @canoesandcosmos, and you can read more at StephanieWritesforKids.com.

 

 

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STEM Tuesday — Bioluminesence– Writing Tips & Resources

By on October 15, 2024   /   Bioluminescence, STEM Tuesday  

 

What do bobtail squids, comb jellies, and lanternsharks have in common? Along with many other living things, these marine creatures glow in the dark. But why? In terms of economies, what does bioluminescence do for an animal? For some, it helps them attract mates—or meals. For vampire squids, it’s actually a defense mechanism; instead of squirting ink like other cephalopods, they squirt glowing mucus to distract predators. In terms of how creatures glow in the dark, there are multiple answers. But we’ll get to that in a minute. For now, why is an important question, one that leads to our first exercise.

Writing Prompt 1 | Facts as Fantasy Seeds

I’ve personally found that some of my best fiction writing germinates from simple facts. For example:

“Soldiers in the trenches sometimes used glowworms to read maps without drawing dangerous attention to themselves” (35)

GLOW: The WILD WONDERS OF BIOLUMINESCENCE BY JENNIFER N. R. SMITH

What ingenuity! This cool fact is a perfect seed for a fictional premise.

Come up with a glowing fantasy creature. Why does it glow? Choose one of the reasons listed above, or invent your own. How has this creature influenced the world in which it lives? What inventions has this living-glow technology inspired? How might your glowing creature factor into the plot of your book? What problems might bioluminescent life forces be able to solve – in what low-light situations might they ethically (or unethically, if you’re writing a dystopian novel) be put to use? Brainstorm for at least 15 minutes, taking down every writerly thought you have. For extra credit, sketch your creature.

Adapt the Exercise for Classroom Use
What are your students’ favorite animals and why? Use the bioluminescence prompt above with students as-is, or let them choose their own found fact to work with.

Writing Prompt 2 | What’s the Difference?

Again from Smith’s book GLOW, when reading about bioluminescence, I noticed two related words: biofluorescence and biophosphorescence. They all have to do with glowing in the dark, but the differences are scientifically significant. Let’s take a look:

  1. Fireflies and glow sticks are both examples of luminescence; they work due to chemical reactions. The other two don’t create light through chemical reactions, but capture light from other sources.)
  2. Fluorescent materials absorb non-visible light and convert it into visible light, emitting no afterglow. Sapphires, amber, pearls, and other gemstones are prime examples of fluorescent materials because they glow under UV light, but stop glowing immediately when the light is turned off. Biofluorescent organisms include polka-dot tree frogs, hawksbill sea turtles, and scorpions.
  3. Phosphorescent materials store the light they absorb, emitting it more slowly. Because their glow lasts for a while after their initial exposure to a light source, glow-in-the-dark stars are an example of phosphorescence. The study of biophosphorescence—phosphorescence in living organisms—is relatively new, with reports of such in rice, starch, and millipedes.

All this to say, paying attention to words’ definitions can make a huge difference. Before beginning, select three to five sentences from a work-in-progress. They could be from an article, a novel, an essay. Whatever you (or your students, if you’re using this as a classroom activity) are working on.

This second writing exercise is inspired by Several Short Sentences about Writing by Verlyn Klinkenborg. He wrote that to be a writer,

“You need an ever-growing vocabulary—

and with it the awareness

that most words carry several meanings.

You need to look up even familiar words

every time you have a doubt

and especially

when you don’t have a doubt.

That is, very often.

That is, every time you write” (58).

With this in mind, look up the definitions of every noun, verb, and adjective in your sentences and revise each sentence in at least two different ways. Here are some tips:

  • Wherever there’s an -ly adverb, consider upgrading your verb.
  • Consider what each sentence denotes (literally means) vs. what it connotes (implies). Is it doing the work you intend? Browse a thesaurus to find other words that may capture your intended meaning(s) more accurately.
  • Moving from known information to new information is one way to ensure that you don’t lose readers. Could rearranging your sentences’ phrases clarify your meaning(s)?
  • Consider how the revised sentences compare with the originals. Did you learn anything new during this process?

If you try these exercises, comment below about how they worked for you, or hop over to my website and contact me.

Best,

Stephanie Jackson

A nature-loving creative, Stephanie Jackson writes poems, articles, picture books, middle-grade novels, and more. Her nonfiction has been published in Cricket magazine and her poems have been published in The Dirigible Balloon and various literary journals including 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. In 2025, she’s graduating from Utah Valley University with her English degree, emphasis in creative writing. She interacts with the kidlit community on Twitter as @canoesandcosmos, and you can read more at StephanieWritesforKids.com.

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STEM Tuesday — Bioluminesence– In the Classroom

By on October 8, 2024   /   Bioluminescence, STEM Tuesday  

 

 

 

 

 

 

This month I learned from the following books that there are a LOT of animals that glow:

Mysterious Glowing Mammals: An Unexpected Discovery Sparks a Scientific Investigation

by Maria Parrott-Ryan

This book tells the story of scientific discovery. I love how it shows the twists and turns that scientists follow when they’re exploring a topic.

 

Animals That Glow: Fireflies and Glowworms

by Joyce Markovics

This book highlights a few animals that glow on land, specifically fireflies and glowworms.

Animals That Glow: Octopuses and Squid

by Joyce Markovics

This book explores the octopuses and squid that glow in the ocean. Some create their own light, while other harness the light made by other creatures.

 

 

Bonus: Luminous: Living Things that Light Up the Night

by Julia Kuo

This picture book is a great introduction to bioluminescence. Simple text is augmented with informative sidebars. The animals highlighted come from all around the world, on land and at sea. This could be a great read-aloud to kick off the exploration of glowing animals.

 

Animal Research Project

As I mentioned before, there are a LOT of animals that glow. I thought this would make a great research project. Have each student pick an animal that glows and research it – there are enough glowing animals that every student can explore something different.

Have each student create a poster highlighting their glowing animal. Set up an exhibition, showing off all the amazing animals. Each poster should include:

  • Animal name
  • Where found – both habitat and geographic location. (Include a range map.)
  • Image of animal
    • For more fun, use glow-in-the-dark paints to illustrate where and what color the animal glows. Use a blacklight to show off the glow.
  • How it glows
    • What makes it glow? Bioluminescence, fluorescence, symbiosis?
  • When is animal active?
  • Why it glows?
  • Other fun facts

Alternatively, turn the research into one or more social media posts. Social media is a great way to impart information to lots of people. The National Park Service and US Fish and Wildlife Service do an exceptional job using social media. As I was preparing for this month’s post, I saw this social media post about glow-in-the-dark scorpions: https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=916191667218097

Explore Your Backyard

Fireflies are perhaps the best-known glowing animal. Do a little exploration. Are there fireflies in your area? If not, should there be?

There is a firefly atlas you can explore to help with this: https://www.fireflyatlas.org/map. If you have fireflies in your area, look into how you can contribute to the map. Learn about how you can tell different fireflies apart by their blinking pattern.

If there should be fireflies in your area, but you don’t see any, examine why. What kind of habitat do fireflies need? What can you do to help provide that habitat?

If you don’t (and shouldn’t) have fireflies in your area, are there other local glowing animals and/or plants?

More Resources

You could use this month’s theme to jump into exploring light and/or color. There are also quite a few resources and activities out there that focus on bioluminescence. Here are a few.

NOAA Bioluminescence Education Theme: https://oceanexplorer.noaa.gov/edu/themes/bioluminescence

Smithsonian Ocean: Bioluminescence: https://ocean.si.edu/ocean-life/fish/bioluminescence

WHOI: How does bioluminescence work? https://www.whoi.edu/know-your-ocean/did-you-know/how-does-bioluminescence-work

TeachEngineering: Exploring Bioluminescence in Aquatic Animals: https://www.teachengineering.org/activities/view/rice-2638-light-dyes-exploring-bioluminescence-activity

Science Buddies: Explore Glow-in-the-Dark Water! https://www.sciencebuddies.org/stem-activities/tonic-water-glows

Ocean Conservancy: Why Do Animals Glow? https://oceanconservancy.org/blog/2019/08/06/animals-glow-bioluminescence

Janet Slingerland has written over 2 dozen books for young readers. One of her latest projects is creating firefly habitat in her backyard. To find out more about Janet and her books, check out her website: http://janetsbooks.com

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