Senor Parrot’s Perch

Each spring My wife fills the deck with flowers. We enjoy their beauty until the fall frosts kill them off. But we’re not the only ones. Bees are everywhere, flying about from flower to flower in the hunt for more pollen. Hundreds of bees. We’ve never been bothered by them and they’ve never seemed bothered by us. It’s a happy coexistence.

Bees, specificly Honey Bees, are the subject of Jay Hosler’s  graphic novel Clan Apis. Taking the graphic novel approach, author Jay Hosler encapsulated the life cycle of honey bees within a coming of age story and found an interesting and effective way to teach kids about the ecology of honey bees. Hosler’s approach is to imagine a hive, or clan, of honey bees endowed with human motivations, through them telling the amazing story of the Honey Bee. The illustration is excellent, lively, and entertaining. I’ve included a few panels from the book that I snagged from Hosler’s website for you to see.

It’s surprising how much actual detail and information Hosler conveys through this method, while keeping the interest in the story high. Beginning with a young larva and it’s older sister, Hosler details in clear and interesting detail the growth cycle and social lives of bees. As the young larva, Nyuki, grows into a young bee she absolutely buzzes with questions. Her older sister, Dvorah, is always there explaining to her the ways of bees and their jobs and duties.

 

Like a child eager to grow up, Nyuki is eager to find her own way, against the advice of her older sister, landing herself in the middle of dangerous straits. This opens the doorway to explain the environment that the bees find themselves in. Older sister Dvorah, along with a friend or two, guide Nyuki through each stage of life, passing along a trove of interesting information about the lives and ecology of honey bees along the way.

I’m not sure when this book was first published. The author’s website has different dates, ranging from 1998, 1999 and 2000, and my copy says it was printed in 2000. So it doesn’t include information about the current die-offs of the North American honey bee population, but that’s not a drawback for value of this text. In a classroom setting, the interest and sympathy for bees this book would generate would serve to motivate some interesting discussions about Colony Collapse Disorder, which is destroying large numbers of bees in the U.S.

Ascribing human-like motivation to animals and their evolutionary development is a common approach to scientific story-telling. It’s also one of my pet peeves. It’s a method scientists use to demonstrate the rationality of evolution – why nature takes the course that has led us to our current state. You might call it a Will to Evolve, and this is pure nonsense from a evolutionary science perspective. This is certainly the case with Hosler’s Clan Apis. He can be forgiven in this instance because he is in fact telling a fictional story, carefully constructed with science tossed in, and the story is meant to motivate an interest in the material. All of this he does very well.

How to Clone a Sheep

By Hazel Richardson

Illustrated by Andy Cooke

Kids love science when it’s served up on their level and written in a lively, humorous style. That’s exactly what you get with How to Clone a Sheep by Hazel Richardson and Illustrated by Andy Cooke. This fun little book is a first-rate introduction to genetics, DNA and cloning aimed at kids in about the 4th through 8th grades. The book also has some activities that are easy and educational.

How to Clone a Sheep covers the basics. Beginning by explaining what exactly are clones, DNA and genes, the book approaches the subject from a historical perspective, explaining historical thought about the inheritance of traits and how these ideas were either confirmed or rejected. Finally, it explains the science and methodology employed to produce Dolly, the famous cloned sheep. There is quite a bit of interesting historical information provided, as well. Richardson’s description of the race among scientists to discover the secrets of DNA is especially amusing, and it gives us an inside perspective on scientific research.

I think that adults would enjoy reading this along with their kids. In fact, it was my 6th grader who found this book and passed it along to me after reading it herself. She insisted I’d love it and she was right. The explanations are simplified and accompanied by terrific cartoonish drawings that perfectly illustrate the text.

Space Scientists have located what they believe are tunnels beneath the surface of Mars. Probably formed by volcanic activity, these tunnels may harbor existing or former microbial life. This story is reported on LiveScience.com and titled Mars Caves Might Protect Microbes (or Astronauts). They may also prove suitable to protect astronauts from manned Mars missions from some of the harsher martian environmental extremes, such as radiation or dust storms.

If you’re interested in an good introduction to the science of astrobiology, or life in outer space, check out Life on Earth — and Beyond: An Astrobiologist’s Quest by Pamela S. Turner. My review of this book from a few months ago is titled Searching for Life on Other Planets.

Ever been burned by some junky, cheap telescope or microscope? I have. There it was, in the store, a great price, and you could see the excitement in your kid’s face as he or she pulled it out of the box and set it up outside. Then after you brought it home, and you watched with anticipaiton as your kid tore open the box and set it up, it turned out to be so poorly made or the optics were so awful it was unusable? 

So how can I find something that isn’t junk that really does open a window into the universe? Now, help is here, at least for telescopes. Telescopes 101,  over at Spaceref.com, is a great place to start learning about choosing a telescope. I stumbled on it in an add on a news site I was reading this morning.

The first thing they point out is that magnifaction is not the most important feature. Apparently this is where  newbies like myself are usually fooled.

So what is is important? It’s Aperture (or objective). This is the fancy name for width of the lense. It can be measured in inches or centimeters and generally, the wider, the better.

Why is aperture so important? The wider the lense, the more light that the telescope gathers, and the more light it gathers, the clearer and more detailed the image you can see.

The article goes on to clearly show the differences between three types of telescopes, in diagrams and in their relative advantages and disadvantages. The diagrams are excellent.

So, with summer coming soon, get ready to read the skies. If your community is anything like mine (Madison, WI), then you’ll also have plenty of opportunities to connect with groups of amatuer astronomers, and maybe even a few pros, to get acquainted with our neighbors in the galaxy.

Last summer my family joined a group led by some graduate students from the University of Wisconsin. Out in a park, on the edge of town, armed with a telescope, they had us looking at passing satallites, planets and constellations. They even told us the stories and myths of these constellations from various cultures. The favorites were the from the North American Indians, which were often quite funny.

A few other good links:

• I bought my telescope. Now what?
• So you want to buy a telescope …  Advice for Beginners
  
• Telescopes for Beginners in Astronomy

My daughter and I are planning on getting a lego robot and experimenting with it. Here is a video some teacher put together of her students working with them. This video is from TeacherTube, and I wish I knew more about it, other than this looks fun.

Just as the teacher/narrator says, there are lots of principles of math involved, most of which are not that advanced, even for young kids. This strikes me as a great way to increase interest in math, programming and engineering in school kids.