Senor Parrot's Perch

Bubble Homes and Fish Farts by Fiona Bayrock
Illustrated by Carolyn Conahan
ISBN 9781570916694

On the strength of several reviews a couple months ago, I went out and got Bubble Homes and Fish Farts by Fiona Bayrock and Illustrated by Carolyn Conahan. I read it through quickly and found it quite good. I thought it would be over the head of my 6-year old, but I also thought that this book may help turn her into a junior naturalist. We learn a lot looking at the world around us and books like Bubble Homes and Fish Farts help us know what to look for and how to look. In particular, this book helps explain how animals use bubbles to survive and thrive in their environment.

My family spends a lot of time exploring a local lake in kayaks or sailboats and we enjoy looking for cool stuff. My 6-year old has an old root beer bottle with a cap that she uses to collect her lake specimens, usually weeds and other floating stuff. She’s already beginning to look closely at nature. As we read through the book last night I spent time talking about what we might find in the lake that’s making those bubbles we see from time to time. Now, we have even more things to look for now. I then reminded her of the spittlebugs inside the foamy bubbles on many of the plants in the neighborhood that we look at while walking the dog. All this was fun for her and made a connection in her mind.

Along the way in this book, I did learn about fish FaRTs, that is, Fast Repetitive Ticks. Herring, at night, swallow air and pass it out the other end, possibly using this to communicate amongst themselves in the dark ocean waters. There’s an experiment for you – how do you test the communication theory? I remember when I was young, and way up north in the frigid taconite country of Hibbing, Minnesota. In winter we’d all be outside shivering and talking excitedly but never hear a word that another was saying. Our words froze up in our breath and fell onto the snow covered playground with hushed clunks. We’d pick a few of our frozen conversations up and take them inside, where they’d thaw out and produce a random, nonsense conversation as our words escaped their frosty prisons. Maybe herring farts will be like that. We just need to pop the bubbles to hear what they’re saying. I can see a research grant proposal here! Stranger ones have been funded.

Its raining today. The kids are home sick, too. They’ll want to get on the computer and play Webkinz or something like that, or they’ll want to watch TV all day. All brain rot, really. They’ll be bored and drive my wife crazy. They need an activity, and a fun one, and why not a brain building one?

Cool Gravity Activities: Fun Science Projects About Balance by James Hopwood is full of fun, simple, and thought provoking science activities. Beginning with some basic instruction on scientific method, the book sets some rules for the activities. Really, they’re hints on what to look for, and set the stage for kids to learn.

Second, there is a two page layout of things the kids can find around the house to use in their experiments. Maybe a hockey stick, or a rake, or a ruler or thread. Get some eggs, metal forks and wooden popsicle sticks. A few more things and you’re ready. I’d skip on the bathroom plunger, though. Yuck! Maybe a kid’s garden shovel, or something like that.

Now to the activities. Each has pointers on what to look for, instructions on performing the experiment, an explanation of the science behind the activity, and a practical application for real life. There’s quick projects like balancing a plunger, or a more suitable substitute, making tops from oddly shaped pieces of paper, or how an uncooked egg spins compared to a hard-boiled egg. Some of these will be fun for your kids to use to show off to their friends. Try balancing two forks and a popsicle stick on one finger!

None of the experiments takes too long and each incorporates writing data and findings in a journal. This writing part is critical. Scientists write down everything and then misplace it. Engineers know where they put everything. If you kid loses his or her notes, you know they’ll be a scientist. If they tidy them up, file them alphabetically and cross-reference them, they’ll be librarians. But if they just keep them organized on a bookshelf, they’ll be engineers.

For the most part, engineering is applied science. What makes engineering so fascinating is the context of how science is applied to solve problems and to do practical things. A lot of non-engineering  jobs use applied science, as well. Steve Wolf’s fun, informative, and fascinating book, The Secret Science Behind Movie Stunts and Special Effects is all about how he uses science to create special effects for movies and TV. It’s this Hollywood context that makes the book so fun and adds the “Cool” factor often needed to make a kid want to learn more and study harder so that he or she can do this sort of cool stuff, too.

This book isn’t some dumbed-down effort to coax kids to try science, because. Wolf jumps right in, using the example of setting off an explosion, to get started talking meaningfully about the several states of matter and chemical reactions, providing excellent working definitions and examples every time. He works forwards and backwards in his examples, beginning with something he might do on a set, stepping back to explain scientific principals involved, and then moving forward again to show other ways these principals are harnessed to create other special effects. He has an extensive glossary of terms at the end with additional supplemental material.

The book is well written, explaining fundamental scientific principals in clear and accessible language, making this book suitable for kids in middle school and up. It should appeal to all, but I bet that it hooks a lot more boys than girls. I’d recommend trying to get this into the hands of any bright kid who’s just not motivated to study science.  It has fun illustrations showing lots of the special tools and gear that special effects people use and how their special effects are pulled off.

Wolf has a website called, naturally, scienceinthemovies.com, that supports his book and the presentations he makes. He has videos of presentations and lots of links to science sites, grouped by topics.

Teen Science Fair Sourcebook: Winning School Science Fairs and National Competitions

Author: Tanya Vicker

ISBN:  978-0766027114

As kids grow up, science often becomes a tedious exercise in memorization and pointless facts. But if you talk to scientists, these “boring” facts are keys that they use to unlock mysteries. For engineers facts are like legos, snap-together pieces of knowledge that they can use to build anything they can imagine.

Where does the spark come from that transforms these facts into the magic formula of knowledge and new ideas? I think that it is innate in some kids, to be sure, but I also think that bored kids can become excited by the challenge of learning by seeking answers to their own questions and by seeing it modeled while they study their science.

I suspect it has a lot to do with how we teach science as a one size fits all endeavor, too. It appears that Tanya Vicker thinks so, too. In a newspaper article I found online in The Salt Lake Tribune about Vicker, a science fair coach at the Academy for Math, Engineering and Science (AMES) in Holladay, Utah.

Vicker’s book is entitled Teen Science Fair Sourcebook: Winning School Science Fairs and National Competitions (Prime Single Titles).

The book focuses on using science projects to get teens interested in pursuing science projects that they feel strongly about and then to develop and research for the projects themselves. Driven by their own interests, many students develop original projects that can lead to awards and enormous college scholarship offers. They also learn how to transform their own questions into research and action. I’ve put this on my library list. I suspect that it’s a missing link between introduction to science through rote learning and being a scientist for fun (and profit).

From the article:

It’s about preparing kids for life and post-secondary education. “That means learning to think critically and “celebrating their capacity to become smarter every day,” Church said.

Vickers can think of no better tool than science and says if her students succeed, it’s because of their own ideas and energy.

The “project-based” learning model inherent to science fairs simply unleashes students’ potential, she said. She’s so committed to the ideal, she teaches it at the U.’s education department, training tomorrow’s teachers to weave science into English, history and math curricula.

Kids get so invested in their projects they hardly realize how hard they’re working, Vickers said. Babb, for example, used baby-sitting money to help pay for her test kits. And Vickers recalls another girl whose physics project caught the attention of recruiters at MIT.

“She had never even taken a physics class,” Vickers said. “If you get the right kids matched with the right project, they’ll knock your socks off.”

Digging for Bird Dinosaurs: An Expedition to Madagascar by Nic Bishop. ISBN-10: 0395960568.

Dinosaurs, a great fascination to younger kids, can frequently become old news by the time they’re in middle school. Colorful monsters chasing one another, eating and being eaten, after a while, gets to be the same old same old. What can we do to keep the early joy of science alive?

Nic Bishop has the cure. In his Digging for Bird Dinosaurs: An Expedition to Madagascar (Scientists in the Field Series) he trails real paleontologist Cathy Forster from her university lab at the State University of New York at Stony Brook to the arid island of Madagascar, a virtual treasure island of prehistoric fossils, where she is part of a dinosaur digging expedition, and back again to New York. Her return, laden with bones and fossils that she and her teammates have found buried in the sandstone hills of Madagascar, brings more hard work and more discoveries and even more questions.

What Bishop has produced is a fine portrait of science that is accessible to kids. He captures the intensity and excitement of both the search and the methodical investigation that the scientists undertake to retrieve knowledge from their finds. He also, by following a real scientist, places the life of a scientist in real perspective as someone working with others and living a life that involves both the lab and research and life within the community, as well.

This book, illustrated with photographs taken by Bishop, is an outstanding work, depicting the life of a scientist accurately: lots of hard work, sometimes tedious and exacting, sometimes exotic and adventurous, and always driven by a thirst for insight that fuels the passion to push on for answers. Science is great fun. Learning and discovery are intensely rewarding. Creating new knowledge from pieces of facts and observations is exciting. Books such as this help kids learn this lesson early, before they let adults who’ve let themselves be intimidated by science and learning get to squelch its joys.

Boy, Were We Wrong About the Solar System, written by Kathleen V. Kudlinski and illustrated by John Rocco is a very fun and instructive history of scientific thinking about our solar system. Its my most recent stop to understanding the universe.

Beginning with the belief that the Earth was the center of the solar system and continuing through current scientific theories and activities, this book follows a predictable pattern:

• This is what we thought;
• Boy were we wrong!
• This is what we’re thinking now.

What I like about this book is how it presents scientific deduction from observations and evidence, testing what we think by seeing how well it aligns with what we see. For example, the ancient Greeks determined that the Earth was round because the shadow it cast upon the moon was round. Comets streaking through the sky didn’t crack the heavenly spheres of crystal, so perhaps the Earth and the planets were drifting through space. The appearance of new stars meant that the heavens were not unchanging.

Changing our ideas based upon data and testing ideas against data is the underpinning of science. This book emphasizes that. However, it is short on how these scientific principals translated into mathematical concepts that provided data of their own. Mathematical models, be it geometrical descriptions of the orbits of the planets, or the equations of gravity are fundamental to our understanding of the universe.

The models of the universe created by Copernicus and Kepler predicted the planets’ movements much better than the old theory. That is why we accepted their ideas and rejected the others. Isaac Newton’s Theory of Gravity improved these explanations more by helping to explain variations in the planets orbits when they were near each other, even leading to the hypothesis that there was another planet beyond Saturn. Ah, Math! the language of science.

Author Kathleen V. Kudlinski has also written Boy, Were We Wrong About Dinosaurs!

Book: Boy, Were We Wrong About the Solar System

Author: Kathleen V. Kudlinski

Illustrator: John Rocco

ISBN: 978-0-525-46979-7

Pluto, that distant round thing out there past Neptune, formerly planet number 9, now number 10-maybe, or the un-planet- maybe. How you count ‘em is still up in the air!

Dwarf Planets: Pluto, Charon, Ceres, and Eris (Amazing Science (Picture Window)) is another of the kid’s science books on our solar system I’ve read to get familiar with the recent changes in how we classify and view the objects in our solar system. It does a good job for early elementary school age kids.

There is a big disagreement among scientists and astronomers on the status of whether Pluto qualifies as a planet and there seem to be good arguments on both sides.

For young readers, 2nd to 4th grades, the author Nancy Loewen sidesteps most of the controversy, but does discuss the change in Pluto’s status from planet to dwarf planet. In addition, she tells the stories of three additional dwarf planets that were welcomed into the ranks as dwarf planets as a result of the redefinition of a planet made in 2006.

The writing is simple and short, taking up very little of each page. There are a ‘fun facts’ scattered through the book to provide additional information. At first, I didn’t care much for the style of Jeff Yesh’s illustrations, but looking at what he accomplishes with them, I came to find them very appropriate. He does an excellent job of illustrating the various points of the text, making concepts that might be confusing for a 2nd or 3rd grader very clear.

Just go to Laurel Kornfeld’s Pluto Blog to get a good pro-Pluto perspective.  Laurel comented on my post on books about Pluto and the Solar System (and set me straight on a mistake I’d made). Laurel’s post does a very good job of critiquing the 2006 re-definition of a planet, I think, but it’s beyond young kids, I think.

Or read Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson’ The Pluto Files: the Rise and Fall of America’s Favorite Planet for the un-planet perspective. Listening to a radio interview with him is what sent me down this trail in the first place.

Title: Dwarf Planets: Pluto, Charon, Ceres and Eris

Author: Nancy Loewen

Illustrator: Jeff Yesh

Published 2008 by Picture Window Books

ISBN: 978-1404839595

Pluto and its moon, Charon

So, what’s all this about Pluto not a planet? I know it’s old news, now, but still, it seemed so unfair to me. And look at all the stuff I thought I knew and now I don’t. I guess I’m not as smart as I thought. My fragile self-esteem is taking a beating.

But wait! There’s help out there. For those of us who like being smart, we have the library and bookstores to turn to, and an abundance of good books are out there to both smarten and cheer us up.

This all started about a started for me about a month ago. I was driving to work after dropping my kids off at school and listening to our local public radio station. The host was interviewing the astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson, the author of the the book The Pluto Files. Tyson was one of the proponents for dropping Pluto from the pantheon of the planets and he told the story of the discoveries and thinking that went into the fatal vote. It was quite interesting and and the decision was well reasoned.

That got me thinking. I wanted to know more.

My first stop was the library and I found a great bunch of books varying in targeted age levels.

The first of these, 11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System, by David Aguilar, was excellent. Aimed at kids probably 3rd grade through middle school, this very well written and beautifully illustrated book proceeded through the solar system, starting with how we believe it formed, then the talked about the sun, and then tracked through each planet, their moons, meteors and asteroids.

Hey, did this book say 11 planets? Yup, it did! That’s two up from nine, and I thought we had lost one and had dropped to eight! It actually turns out that rather than declassify Pluto from planet status, we just declared a new classification of planet: Dwarf Planets, and we added Ceres, which dwells in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and the incredibly distant dwarf planet Eris, navigating around the sun in the Kuiper Belt, beyond Pluto.

More than just adding Dwarf Planets to the list, the entire solar system is reclassified to take advantage of what we know about the planets, so In fact we have three classes of planets, based on their similarities and differences:

• Terrestrial: Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars. These are primarily made of of rocks.
• Gas Giants: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. These are great planets made up of frozen gases with our a surface or ground to walk on.
• Dwarfs: Ceres, Pluto, and Eris. These are small planets, not round and covered in frozen ice. There is even some thought that Charon, Pluto’s largest moon, may itself be a dwarf planet. The two are locked into an orbit around each other and could easily be thought of as double-dwarf planets. There’s food for more thought! And these thoughts are covered more in the next book I write about.

11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System is a first-rate science book for kids. I recommend it. I’d really like to hear about more great science books for kids.

Book: 11 Planets: A New View of the Solar System
Author: David Aquilar
ISBN-13: 978-1426302367

Yesterday, the American Institute of Physics (AIP) announced it’s 2008 Science Writing Awards. In its children’s category they presented their award to Sneeze! by Alexandra Siy and Dennis Kunkel.

Sneeze, aimed at the mid to later elementary grade student, follows nine kids and their sneezes, using each as a way to illustrate what is happening and why, using a great mix of photography and illustration. The microscopic photography, from what I’ve been able to view over the internet, looks just fascinating.

“Fascinating” is often the key to generating a kid’s interest in science. They learn from adults and disinterested teachers very early that brain work is yucky, no fun at all. But when someone points to the keyhole into the locked room of science and technology, and lets kids peer inside, they quickly discover a world of endless fascination. Sneeze! is the right sort of keyhole into the realm of science.

Sneeze is published by Charlesbridge (2008).

Everybody knows that a dog is man’s best friend. How about his or her best audience? Dogs are now being used as ‘nonjudgemental’ audiences for children learning to read. Found in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle, we read that young children are reading to dogs in order to build up their literacy, i.e. reading, skills.

The friendly beasts known as “Reading Education Assistance Dogs”, sit quietly,  wag their tails approvingly, and drool, while your kid gets to forge all the way through a book, maybe for the first time.

Yet again, dogs step in where nature or a parent is lacking, and provide a friendly, keen, ear, a lick and a snuggle. Better by far than nothing, but wouldn’t a parent be a grand improvement. Parents should listen as well as read aloud.

Siblings, especially younger ones, love to be read to. If your budding reader has any, the younger siblings are also better than dogs, and the time together forms lifelong bonds, and sparks a conversation, not just barks.

Seems that this approach is nothing new, as this older article from the NY Times indicates. That mysterious bond between man and dog will never be plumbed to it’s full depths, it seems.