Chicken Spaghetti

Sandra Markle's "Octopuses" + Outstanding Science Books for Kids

Octopuses
by Sandra Markle
Lerner Publishing, 2007
40 pages
Age range: 8-12; younger for read-aloud
ISBN-13: 978-0-8225-6063-0

Just because it has eight arms doesn't mean an octopus's life is easy. Sure, growing back a tentacle when necessary is helpful, but much of its existence is spent on the lam from predators. This nonfiction picture book for older readers even shows an oh-so-pretty coral snarfing up a baby octopus. When an octopus isn't escaping or hiding from something, it's looking for a meal. Dead dogfish shark, anyone? Focusing on the eat-or-be-eaten nature of an octopus's life gives the information a dramatic arc, and readers find out fascinating facts about what the strange-looking creature does to protect itself.  A prolific science and nature writer, Sandra Markle conveys her subject matter in a clear, straightforward style, and the book, part of a series called "Animal Prey," features large color photos throughout, which correspond well with the text. 

The National Science Teachers Association and the Children's Book Council cited Octopuses—and 31 other titles in 8 categories—in the brand-new 2008 edition of Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12. A great resource for parents as well as teachers and librarians, this list is one that many of us anticipate with glee every year.

A hat tip to The Miss Rumphius Effect for NSTA book-list news.

Buzz, Buzz

MotherReader is thinking about the differences between fiction and nonfiction picture books and how some titles toe the line between the two categories. Being certain that a book is nonfiction, she says, is "certainly easy when your book is titled Bees and it's all facts about, you know, bees."

Her comment sent me scurrying to the shelves for Honeybees, written by Deborah Heiligman and illustrated by Carla Golembe. Sporting good information and lots of bright colors, it's a picture book that my son and I read often a few years back. Bees haunted Junior's preschool playground in the summer, and he was terrified of them—and found them endlessly compelling and worthy of many conversations. He still can watch those honeycomb things with live bees that you see in nature centers forever. I bet that when he spots Honeybees this afternoon, he'll want to read it again.

Honeybees is straight-up nonfiction; it's not one of those line-toers that MotherReader mentions. For more facts, don't miss the Nonfiction Monday roundup at Picture Book of the Day, which will be posted later this afternoon.

Honeybees
by Deborah Heiligman
National Geographic Society, 2002; 2007 (paperback edition)
32 pages
ISBN: 9781426301575

For Kids Who Like Facts: Orbis Pictus Award

Each year the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) gives out the Orbis Pictus award for excellence in children's nonfiction books. Here is this year's roster, announced last week. Some of these books are familiar Cybils nominees*, while others don't ring any bells to me at all. I'm off to the library to put in a request for Clarabelle. I can't resist a good cow book.

Winner

M.L.K.: Journey of a King, by Tonya Bolden

Honor Books

Black and White Airmen: Their True History, by John Fleischman*
Helen Keller: Her Life in Pictures, by George Sullivan
Muckrakers, by Ann Bausum*
Spiders, by Nic Bishop
Venom, by Marilyn Singer

Recommended

3-D ABC: A Sculptural Alphabet, by Bob Raczka*
Animals in the House: A History of Pets and People, by Sheila Keenan
Clarabelle: Making Milk and So Much More, by Cris Peterson
Living Color, by Steve Jenkins*
The Snow Baby: The Arctic Childhood of Admiral Robert E. Peary's Daring Daughter, by Katherine Kirkpatrick*
Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion, by Loree Griffin Burns*
The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain, by Peter Sís*

Today marks the beginning of Nonfiction Monday, a weekly event started by Anastasia Suen. Going forth, the author plans to gather together all Monday blog posts about nonfiction for children. Curious five to eight year olds should look for Suen's latest book, Wired, which is all about electricity*. Junior has already applied much of what he read there to what he sees in the neighborhood: "Look, Mom. It's one of those step-down transformers!" You can catch the roundup later this afternoon at Suen's blog Picture Book of the Day.

Thank you to Franki, at A Year of Reading, for the Orbis Pictus news.

Stranded Whales

The Whale Scientists: Solving the Mystery of Whale Strandings
by Fran Hodgkins
Houghton Mifflin, 2007
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-55673-1
64 pages, with color photographs

Another excellent offering in Houghton Miffin's Scientists in the Field series, The Whale Scientists explores theories about why whales beach themselves; not surprsingly, we humans figure into both the causes and the solutions. In fact, our changing relationship with these sea creatures provides the book's arc. Hodgkins begins with a history of industrial whaling and ends with the story of a successful (and labor-intensive) rescue of two pilot whales. Outfitted with satellite tags, they continued to provide scientific data even their release back into the ocean. The scientists in the book include a Smithsonian curator, a specialist in whale necropsies, and a Woods Hole expert on whale ears, who makes analogies to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers.

A Cybils longlist nominee in the middle-grade and young-adult nonfiction category, The Whale Scientists is particularly well-pitched for its age range, well-documented, and good reading for children in the fifth grade on up. Every Scientists in the Field title I've read so far can be appreciated by grown-ups, too. I'm certainly game for a whale watch now!

Science Book for Kids: Sneeze!

Sneeze!
by Alexandra Siy and Dennis Kunkel
Charlesbridge, 2007
ISBN: 978-1-57091-654-0
46 pages

Colorized electron micrographs devoted to a routine bodily function are the big draws in this picture book for seven to ten year olds. For the layman, I'll translate: you will marvel over the tinted, blown-up photos of delightfully disgusting environmental irritants like pollen, mildew, and household dust. The almost glowing orange dust mite (765 times its actual size) practically defines the word "gross."

Grainy (and markedly less compelling) black-and-white photographs show children in different sneeze-inducing situations, like spicing up food, dusting furniture, and snuggling with a cat. These pictures and their captions (" 'Pass the pepper, please,' Isaiah says.") indicate that the book is for younger readers. But the science explanations start with the relatively simple ("A sneeze is a reflex, an automatic reaction that can't be stopped once it starts."), and advance fairly quickly. ("The electrical impulse zips along the axon until it arrives at the synapse, the point of communication between two neurons.") The neuroscience particulars may elude all but the savviest in the target age group. My advice for younger scientists: enjoy the micrographs now, and hang onto the book for tenth grade biology.

Sneeze! was on the longlist in the Cybils awards' middle-grade/young-adult nonfiction category.

Science Prize Shortlist

In science-award news, the following books are finalists for 2008 AAAS/Suburu  SB&F Prizes. AAAS stands for the American Association for the Advancement of Science. SB&F refers to Science Books and Films Online, "a critical review journal." The shortlist was announced earlier this month. From what I can determine, the YA selections are adult titles that would appeal to teens, too.

• Children's Science Picture Book

Babies in the Bayou, written and illustrated by Jim Arnosky (Penguin Group,   2007

Gregor Mendel: The Friar Who Grew Peas, by Cheryl Bardo, with illustrations by Jos A. Smith (Harry N. Abrams. 2007)

Turtle Summer: A Journal for My Daughter, by Mary Alice Monroe, with photographs by Barbara J. Bergwerf (Sylvan Dell. 2007)

Vulture View, by April Pulley Sayre, with illustrations by  Steve Jenkins (Henry Holt, 2007)

Where in the Wild? Camouflaged Creatures Concealed and Revealed,  by David Schwartz and Yael Schy, with photographs by Dwight Kuhn (Tricycle Press, 2007) 

• Middle Grades Science Book

Being Caribou:  Five Months on Foot with a Caribou Herd, by Karsten Heuer (Walker & Co., 2007)

Circulating Life: Blood Transfusion from Ancient Superstitions to Modern Medicine, by Cherie Winner (Twenty-First Century Books, 2007)

Dinosaur Eggs Discovered: Unscrambling the Clues! by Lowell Dingus, Luis M. Chaippe, and Rodolfo Coria (Twenty-First Century Books, 2007)

Frog Heaven: Ecology of a Vernal Pool, by Doug Wechsler (Boyds Mills Press, 2007)

Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion, by Loree Griffin Burns (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)      

• Young Adult Science Book         

The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier (Houghton Mifflin, 2007)

An Ocean of Air: Why the Wind Blows and Other Mysteries of the Atmosphere, by Gabrielle Walker (Harcourt, 2007)

Is Pluto a Planet? A Historical Journey Through the Solar System, by David A. Weintraub (Princeton, 2006)

The Wild Trees: A Story of Passion and Daring, by Richard Preston (Random House, 2007)

• Hands-on Science Book

Exploratopia,  by Pat Murphy, Ellen Macaulay, and the staff of the Exploratorium (Little Brown & Company, 2007)

Stellar Science Projects about Earth's Sky, by Robert Gardner (Enslow, 2007)

Temperature, by Navin Sullivan (from the Measure Up! Series)  (Marshall Cavendish, 2006)

Adventures with "The Snake Scientist"

In addition to re-reading some old Halloween favorites, my son and I are slowly working our way through The Snake Scientist, by Sy Montgomery. The 48-page title from 1999 is part of Houghton Mifflin's "Scientists in the Field" series, which recently issued Loree Griffin Burns' Tracking Trash. The snake scientist, one Bob Mason from Oregon State, studies the red-sided garter snakes who hibernate by the thousands in pits in Manitoba. In her book A Gathering of Garter Snakes, the former National Geographic photographer Bianca Lavies looked at the same phenomenon. Several years ago I read the Lavies book aloud repeatedly at Junior's request. He picks up our local garter snakes with ease. If they're spending the winter massed in our yard somewhere, I have no doubt that he will find them.

Montgomery's Snake Scientist is a photo-rich picture book for older readers, 10 to 14, and contains almost more text than my 8 year old's attention can handle, even in a read-aloud situation. But we keep going because the subject is fascinating. And I've pretty much agreed to a field trip to Manitoba some spring so that we, too, can be scientists in the field and watch the snakes come out of hibernation.

What snake-loving kid can resist the following intro?

You hear them before you see them. One a quiet day, as you approach one of the dens at the Narcisse Wildlife Management Area in Manitoba, Canada, you can hear a rustling like wind in dry leaves.

It's the sound of thousands of slithering snakes.

When you look over the fence into the shallow limestone pit, at first it seems as if the ground is moving. But it's not the ground—it's 18,000 red-sided garter snakes!

Other books in this series which caught my attention include The Tarantula Scientist, The Bug Scientists, and Swimming with Hammerhead Sharks. I'm planning ahead: no field trip for that last one.

Links: Professor Mason; Sy Montgomery interview at Paper Tigers; article on Snake Scientist photographer Nic Bishop at The Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books;  Manitoba Conservation/Snakes of Narcisse Wildlife Management Area 

Ocean Housekeeping: Get Involved, Sept. 15

Tracking Trash: Flotsam Jetsam, and the Science of
Ocean Motion
by Loree Griffin Burns
Houghton Mifflin, 2007
ISBN-13: 9780618581313
For readers aged 10 and up

One of the year's best books for children is Loree Griffin Burns' Tracking Trash: Flotsam, Jetsam, and the Science of Ocean Motion. Burns writes about a scientist who studies ocean currents by keeping tabs on "flotsam and jetsam, floating trash that falls or is thrown from ships at sea." Augmented by full-color photographs, discussions of giant sneaker spills, masses of plastic netting bigger than school buses, and a Pacific ocean garbage dump the size of Alaska clearly illustrate not only water-current patterns but also the enormous toll that pollution is taking.

Some 80% of the Garbage Patch's contents comes from materials that wash into our oceans from land-based rivers and storm drains. (The Garbage Patch, by the way takes a week to get through by ship.) "What can I do?" a reader is likely to respond. Reduce, reuse, recycle, of course, and more. Loree is a blogging friend, and through her site, I found out about International Coastal Cleanup Day, scheduled in most places for Saturday, September 15th. You can find a cleanup site near your home, at the Ocean Conservancy's web site. The organization Save the Sound is coordinating all the efforts in Connecticut, for example.

25+ Great Science and Nature Books for Five to Eight Year olds

In the last two years, I've written about many science and nature books for five to eight year olds. The following list contains links to the Chicken Spaghetti reviews, some of which are lengthy and some only a sentence or two. (The info in parentheses indicates when I wrote about the book.) All of the books on the list are kid-tested and kid-approved by my resident junior scientist, now a third-grader.

Beetle, by Rebecca Stefoff (June 2006)

Bird books for children (June 2007)

Bird Songs: 250 North American Birds in Song (February 2007). For older kid readers and adults.

Books from various National Science Teachers Association lists. Comments on Compost! Growing Gardens from Your Garbage; Lightning; Tornadoes; All About Deer; From Caterpillar to Butterfly; Honeybees; Horseshoe Crabs and Shorebirds. (May 2005)

Brief reviews of An Egg Is Quiet; Volcanoes and Earthquakes; The Magic Schoolbus: Inside a Hurricane; If a Dolphin Were a Fish; Compost Critters; Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow (December 2006)

Busy, Busy Squirrels (May 2007)

Caves: Mysteries Beneath Our Feet, by David L. Harrison (September 2005)

Frog Heaven: Ecology of a Vernal Pool (July 2007)

Danger: Earthquakes, by Seymour Simon (October 2006)

A Gathering of Garter Snakes, by Bianca Lavies (August 2005)

Hello Fish! Visiting the Coral Reef, by Sylvia Earle. (June 2005)

It's an Amadillo! by Bianca Lavies (June 2006)

Little Lost Bat, by Sandra Markle (November 2006)

Maple-sugaring books: Ininatig's Gift: Traditional Native Sugarmaking, and The Big Tree (March 2007)

A miscellaneous roundup, including Big Bugs; Dive! A Book of Deep Sea Creatures; and Shadows of Night: The Hidden World of the Little Brown Bat (April 2006)

One-line reviews of The Seaside Switch; Shells! Shells! Shells!; One Small Place by the Sea; Once Around the Sun (July 2007)

Our Seasons, by Grace Lin (November 2006)

Rat Attacks (March 2007)

Recycling and garbage. Brief reviews of a few books. (September 2005)

Sea Critters, by Sylvia Earle (August 2006)

Sea Stars: Saltwater Poems (December 2006

DK's Seashore (March 2007)

Seeds, by Ken Robbins. Brief review. (August 2005)

Snowflake Bentley, by Jacqueline B. Martin (January 2006)

Song of the Water Boatman & Other Pond Poems (June 2007)

Starting Life: Ladybug (March 2006)

Super Storms, by Seymour Simon (October 2006)

Tentacles!: Tales of the Giant Squid (August 2006)

Terrible Storm (March 2007)

Volcano books (April 2007)

Why Do Snakes Hiss? (September 2006)

The Works: Anatomy of a City. For adults; good for read-alouds to children interested in science and engineering, too. (January 2007) 

Shining a Light on Science Books

One of my favorite guides went up today: the annual list of outstanding science trade books for children (from kindergarten through high school).  You can read about the best of 2007 at the National Science Teachers Association web site. All books were published in 2006; among the honorees is Cybils winner Butterfly Eyes and Other Secrets of the Meadow, by Joyce Sidman.