Archimedes Notebook

Tuesday's View

2012-02-21T08:46:00.000-05:00

A sunny blue February sky

fools me into leaving my mittens home

Follow that Footprint

2012-02-17T07:32:00.000-05:00

Identifying animal tracks in the snow can be pretty tough. Trackers observe the number of toes and claw marks to determine whose track they’re looking at. But tracks in soft or deep snow may not show any details… and tracks in melting snow can be twice their normal size.

coyote tracks in deep snow; by Linda Spielman

In the winter you might just find deep holes in the ground and drag marks where an animal brushed the snow with its belly or dragged its feet. Or you might find wing-marks where a bird took flight.

What’s a tracker to do? Look at the patterns that tracks leave:

are there alternating prints?
are there sets of two prints?
are there sets of four prints?

Where did this animal go? Try following the tracks.

Tuesday's View

2012-02-14T09:41:00.000-05:00

You've got to be quick with the camera

to catch the snow on the ground these days.

How Clean is your snow?

2012-02-10T07:20:00.000-05:00

Freshly fallen snow makes your backyard took clean and bright. But how clean is that snow? If you live in a city, it may contain particles of pollution. Even snow in rural areas may have some contaminants, as air pollution can travel many miles.

Collect about ten cups of fresh snow and let it melt.

Cover the mouth of a measuring cup or jar with a paper towel or coffee filter.

Then pour the snowmelt through the filter.

Examine the filter paper for tiny particles – you might want to use a hand lens to get a better look. How clean was your snow?

For further investigation you can measure the amount of pollution in your snow. Weigh a filter paper before you pour the melted snow through it. Let it dry with the particles and weigh it again (you’ll need a sensitive scale).

You can also compare snow from different areas: an area with lots of traffic, a field far from a city, your school playground, neighborhood parks.

Tuesday's View

2012-02-07T08:13:00.000-05:00

Not your normal first week of February...

sugar season - two weeks early!

Another Good Book: Inside Earthquakes

2012-02-03T06:52:00.002-05:00

Inside Earthquakes

By Melissa Stewart; illus by by Cynthia Shaw

48 pages, ages 8 and up

Sterling Children's Books 2011

This is part of a series of “inside” books – neat books with fold-out, flip-up pages for a closer look at science. More than a million earthquakes shake our planet each year, writes Melissa Stewart. Most of those temblors are too small to feel, but every now and then a big one comes along and shakes things up.

We think we live on a solid planet, but inside the earth things are always moving. Take those tectonic plates, for example – they move about as fast as our fingernails grow. Stewart maps out the epicenters of quakes and, sure enough, they outline the plates on which our mountains and forests lie.

She explains faults and discusses the tsunamis, avalanches and mudslides that can accompany quakes. In addition to describing how scientists measure temblors (another word for quake) she lists great quakes of our time. “Each year our planet experiences about 140 earthquakes with magnitudes of 6.0 or greater,” Stewart writes. Those are the ones that are powerful enough to cause real damage. Fortunately scientists and architects and engineers are busy working on ways to predict quakes and design better buildings.

The science is spiced up with journal entries and stories from people who experienced earthquakes. Have you ever experienced a large earthquake? I asked Stewart.

No, she said. “But I'm sure it must be very scary.” She reflected on the Haiti earthquake a couple years ago. Recovery has been slow due, in part to the poverty and lack of roads and other infrastructure that would help recovery efforts.

“That quake was especially devastating because the buildings were not constructed with earthquakes in mind,” Stewart said. She noted that Haiti is located near a place where multiple plates meet. “It won't be long before we see another big earthquake in that general area,” she said.

One of the neat things Stewart learned while working on this book is how animals behave prior to an earthquake. They seem to know that something bad is about to happen, she said. But how? “There is a lot to learn about how other animals sense the world.”

Did she ever have second thoughts about writing a children’s book with so much devastation in it? “We were constantly thinking about how to portray the devastation,” Stewart said. “We want kids to get an accurate, honest picture of what’s happening without being too overwhelming.”

The neat thing about writing for kids, she says, is that when they hear about endangered animals or people in crisis, they want to act immediately. And they are often successful at motivating adults to take action. Still, Stewart keeps in mind what she is exposing young people to.

This is part of STEM Friday, a round-up of children's science, technology, engineering and math books. Today's host is Simply Science.

It's also part of Nonfiction Monday which is hosted on Feb. 6 over at Capstone Connect. Review copy provided by the publisher.

Tuesday's View

2012-01-31T07:28:00.000-05:00

snow, sun

patchy drizzle

with rising temperatures

expect 50 degrees

tomorrow!

Winter Tree Walk

2012-01-27T07:17:00.000-05:00

Winter is a perfect time to look at trees because you can see their “skeletons” without all those pesky leaves to distract you. Now you can take a closer look at the patterns in bark and how branches and twigs attach. And you can take a closer look at the buds on the sides and ends of twigs.

On some trees the twigs (and buds) are opposite each other, paired up. Maples, ash, dogwoods and buckeyes have opposite branching – and opposite buds.

Other trees have alternate branching. So the buds alternate along the twig.

What sort of tree buds do you find in your backyard?

If you’re looking for a good book to read about winter trees, go here.

The best field guide I’ve found for this season is the Winter Tree Finder by May T. Watts and Tom Watts.

Tuesday's View

2012-01-24T08:24:00.000-05:00

Yesterday

what a difference a day makes...

On Monday morning we were in the midst of winter and then it started to rain.

Today

Another Good Book: Star of the Sea

2012-01-20T07:55:00.002-05:00

Star of the Sea: A day in the life if a starfish

Written by Janet Halfmann; illus. by Joan Paley

32 pages, for ages 5-9

Henry Holt/Christy Ottaviano Books, 2011

I’ve been carrying this book with me for three months and can’t put it down. I love the bold colors and textures of the collage artwork. I love that the main character is a starfish – a lowly critter that moves about on tube feet and extrudes its stomach into clams. What I love best is that the narrative arc of the book follows the rhythm of the tides. Which makes sense, because tides dictate the daily life of a starfish.

“As the high tide rushes in, Sea Star crawls onto the shore to hunt,” Janet Halfmann writes. We learn the secrets of how tube feet work, how starfish moves by twisting her body like a pretzel. Life is different when your mouth is on your underside, Halfmann points out.

When Sea Star reaches the mussel bed she “hunches over a big mussel and grips its two shells with her strong feet.” Sea Star pulls on the shells to open them; mussel pulls on the shells to keep them closed. It’s a real tug-of-war, but Sea Star gets her supper. Unfortunately the tide has turned and she is stranded on shore – easy prey for a hungry gull. She manages to escape, losing one of her arms (rays) in the process… and makes it back home when the tide returns.

Halfmann lives in Wisconsin, so how did she get inspired to write about sea stars?

“I have written other stories about the sea and its creatures and have always been fascinated by sea stars,” she says. “I think it’s because of their star shape and their many colors and designs. Somehow, they seem almost magical!”

When Halfmann started researching sea stars for her story, she found them to be more amazing than she’d imagined. She learned that sea stars can hunt only underwater – because they use hundreds of tiny, water-powered feet to move.

“When hunting on the shore, they have to wait till the tide comes in,” Halfmann says. “I also was surprised to learn that the sea star’s mouth is on its underside.”

Ironically, when she wrote the story Halfmann hadn’t yet met a sea star up-close-and-personal. So she relied on accounts of scientists. Since writing the story, however, she’s made the acquaintance of an ochre sea star – the star of her story – at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California.

“I made sure to investigate every part,” Halfmann said, “its tube feet, its mouth, its spines, the small hole where water enters on its top side. I felt like I and this sea star shared a special bond.” Now she doesn’t have to travel so far to visit – there’s an aquarium in her hometown of Milwaukee.

In her book, Halfmann has a hungry gull picking up Sea Star for supper. Otters and some fish eat sea stars, she says. But on the shore, the sea star is top predator.

“Other seashore animals are deathly afraid of the sea star,” Halfmann said. “They try to get away fast when they sense a sea star nearby.”

I’m not the only one who loves this book; this fall the National Science Teachers Association named Star of the Sea a 2012 OutstandingScience Trade Book. This review is part of STEM Friday, a round-up of reviews of children's books on science, technology, engineering and math. Today's host is Laurie Thompson.

And part of NonFiction Monday, a round-up of children's nonfiction books. The January 23 host is Shelf-employed.

Tuesday's View

2012-01-17T07:56:00.000-05:00

gray squirrels leap across the road

from oak to maple where the branches almost

meet ... but not quite.

tricky landings, sometimes they

leave surprised squirrel tracks in the snow

below.

Adopt a Twig for Winter

2012-01-13T08:50:00.000-05:00

Trees may look dead during the winter – but they’re not. The leaves may be gone, but there are plenty of buds on the twigs. And each of those weatherproof buds holds next season’s growth.

Take a look for yourself. Find a tree with fat buds on the ends of its branches. Now carefully peel open one of the buds. Inside you’ll see tiny leaves and stems twisted and folded up, waiting to grow once the weather grows warmer.

Adopt a twig and watch the amazing changes that happen as spring returns. Tie a ribbon around your twig so you can find it again. Then take a photo – or draw a sketch – of your bud.

Check back in a month and see how it’s faring. Take another photo, sketch another bud portrait and make sure to write down any changes you see. Does it get bigger? What happens in the spring? Does it turn into a leaf or a flower? Follow it through the fall.

Tuesday's View

2012-01-10T08:12:00.000-05:00

Any other year we'd have the skis out on the back porch...

Sound-mapping

2012-01-06T08:40:00.000-05:00

Winter is a quiet season. The birds that woke us up all summer have flown south; there are no crickets and frogs singing. But even in this hushed stillness there is activity. So find a spot where you can sit, and close your eyes and listen. As you tune in to the different sounds of winter you might hear beech leaves flapping, a chickadee calling, a squirrel scolding you from the trees above.

Try making a sound map in your journal. Note what you hear in front of you, to the sides, behind you. Sketch the arc of a jet passing overhead, the traffic noises, a dog down the street.

Tuesday's View

2012-01-03T08:34:00.000-05:00

one downy woodpecker braves the falling snow

to get first dibs at the suet...

are all the others hiding in the pines

sipping tea and playing euchre?

This Tree is for the Birds

2011-12-23T08:24:00.000-05:00

from the shepherds house

Decorating a tree for the birds is an old tradition dating back to sixteenth century Europe. Not only does it liven up your yard, but decorating a tree with snacks for birds helps them make it through the cold winter days. You don’t need to go buy fancy birdseed ornaments – just gather some things around the house and create your own.

Think about things you can string onto garlands: old raisins, cranberries, dried apples, dates and figs, popcorn and peanuts in the shell. Even cheerios and fruit loops make good garlands.

Hang colored Indian corn, donuts, rice cakes, or bagels smeared with peanut butter and coated with birdseed.

Pack peanut butter into a pinecone (birds prefer chunky, I’m told) and roll that in cornmeal and birdseed.

From Chickens in the Road

Make “bread cookies”. Use a cookie cutter to cut a shape from a slice of bread. Poke a hole in the top for a string and then let the bread dry out overnight. Mix cornmeal, shortening, and peanut butter and spread the mix on both sides of the bread. Then decorate with sunflower seeds and other birdseed.

Use natural brown string, wool yarn, or raffia to hang the decorations. The birds can use the fibers in their spring nest-building.

What ideas can you think up?

Tuesday's View

2011-12-20T07:48:00.000-05:00

A few days before Solstice -

this year it's Thursday, December 22.

Longer days ahead ...

but it will take a few weeks to notice the difference.

Night Walking

2011-12-16T08:09:00.000-05:00

last week's full moon made star-watching difficult

In the winter it seems like the stars are closer to the earth; brighter; easier to see. The waning moon makes this week (and next) a good time for a night walk. Not only that – you might even see some falling stars!

According to the folks at EarthSky there should be a meteor shower peaking near Solstice. The Ursid meteor shower radiates from the bowl of the Little Dipper and should peak next Thursday and Friday, December 22 and 23. It’s a pretty sparse “peak” as meteor showers go – you might see only 10 stars streaking across the sky in an hour. Or you might luck out and see a couple a minute.

Tuesday's View

2011-12-13T06:40:00.000-05:00

now that it's cold the birds are visiting the feeders:

red-bellied woodpeckers, downy and hairy

blue jays, chickadees and nuthatches...

the regular crew.

Storm Tracking

2011-12-09T08:20:00.000-05:00

This week we got our first snow. It started off as rain, then rain mixed with snow. When the temperature dropped it turned to real snow and by the next morning the world looked different.

Because of the ice that accompanied the storm, and the tricky driving conditions early in the morning, the storm made our local news. Nearly every TV station has a “storm tracker” weather segment where they follow snow and ice, hurricanes, blizzards and other weather events.

But you don’t have to be a weatherman to follow storms. You can keep track of the storms right where you live. All you need is your journal, a pencil, and a bunch of curiosity.

In addition to noting the date and kind of storm, here’s some other things you might want to keep track of:

What kind of precipitation is falling out of the sky? Does it change over time? How can you tell?
How does the temperature change over the storm event?
What kind of clouds came before the storm and after?
If there is precipitation, how much? And how can you measure it?
If it’s snow or ice, what does it look like? Feel like?
What does the storm sound like?
What did you notice about birds or other wildlife that hang around your yard?

Tuesday's View

2011-12-06T08:53:00.000-05:00

waiting for winter...

Celebrating Picture Books: Red Sled

2011-12-05T08:31:00.000-05:00

Red Sled

By Lita Judge

Ages 2-5 (and older!)

Atheneum Books for Young Readers (2011)

OK – I realize Picture Book Month is over, but I can’t resist one more book. Kinda like when the baker tucks an extra cookie in the bag…

Red Sled captured me from the cover. It may be a “wordless” book, but with illustrations this expressive, who needs words? A kid leaves his sled outside at night – a clear invitation to a passing bear. With a few onomatopoeic words and her delightful pencil-and-watercolor animals, Judge captures a winter’s night fantasy. I especially love the way she portrays each animal’s personality as they pile on the sled for one last ride. Fortunately, the sled survives.

Grab this book, snuggle up with a kid and enjoy a really fun read- aloud.

STEM Friday - Prairie Storms

2011-12-01T22:12:00.003-05:00

Prairie Storms

Written by Darcy Pattison; illus. by Kathleen Rietz

32 pages, for ages 4-8

Sylvan Dell Publishing, 2011

December on the prairie can be tough. “A blizzard rages, a sudden whiteout. The bison herd turns, facing into the teeth of the wind,” writes Darcy Pattison in her newest book, Prairie Storms.

Storms may not bother the bison, but when I hear the wind howling and the sleet rattling at my windows, I make a hot cup of cocoa and snuggle up with a good book.

Pattison raises an interesting question: what do animals do when the snow flies? How do they deal with rain and hail? Month-by-month she takes us into the secret lives of prairie animals: into the burrows of prairie dogs; into the den of a cougar. Who knew that skunks roll up balls of straw to close their doorway? At the end of the book she's included some activities for curious and creative minds.

Pattison lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, a town right on the edge of the prairie, she says. And while it’s not the “Great Prairie” of the Midwest, it served as inspiration and an outdoor lab for her as she worked on the book.

“I wanted to write about animals,” she said. She wanted to explore the relationship between animals and their habitats, but in a different way. “And when you live on the prairie, the sky is the biggest thing around,” she said. So Pattison began investigating how different creatures deal with weather. And that meant a lot of research. And a lot of field trips to the Baker PrairieNatural Area, just outside of Harrison.

Then she started thinking about how to pull all the nifty stuff she learned into a book. Picture books have 14 spreads (the double-page illustrations), she pointed out. “So doing something that focused on the 12 months seemed natural.” Pattison then made two lists: one of the mammals and birds and reptiles she’d seen; the other about the kinds of storms her prairie areas experience over the span of a year.

How did she get the prose so lyrical? “I wrote it as poetry, first,” Pattison admitted.

What was the neat new thing she learned? “Earless lizards!” she said. Despite their name, they hear well enough.

This is part of STEM Friday. Review copy provided by the publisher.

Check out what great books other people are reviewing below. To add a link to your blog, just leave a comment or send an email to sueheaven [at] gmail [dot] com. I'll check periodically throughout the day.

Jeff Barger reviews How Does Medicine Know Where you Hurt? over at NC Teacher Stuff.

Shirley reviews The Life of Rice at Simply Science. She always includes some activities with her reviews.

Anastasia Suen introduces a pop-up physics book, Feel the Force over at Chapter Book of the Day.

Not a review, but worth checking out: an interesting post on the importance of integrating art with STEM at INK.

Tuesday's View

2011-11-29T08:43:00.000-05:00

The squirrels spend their days

rummaging through the leaves on the ground.

Are they looking for hickory nuts?

Or have they forgotten where they buried the acorns?

Celebrating Picture Books: Bag in the Wind

2011-11-27T20:15:00.003-05:00

Recycling plastic grocery bags is great – but what happens when a bag falls out of the recycling bin? Find out in this final celebration of picture book month.

Bag in the Wind

By Ted Kooser; illus. by Barry Root

Ages 5 and up

Candlewick Press 2010

“One cold, windy morning early in spring, a bulldozer was pushing a big pile of garbage around a landfill when it uncovered an empty plastic bag.” That’s how poet Ted Kooser starts his story. This perfectly good bag – the color of the skin of a yellow onion, with two holes for handles – is picked up by a puff of wind and blown over the chain-link fence. From there it is blown into the lives of several people: a girl collecting cans; a store owner with a drafty door; a homeless man.

The story comes full circle when Margaret – the can-collector – uses it to carry home her purchases from a consignment shop. Only, she doesn’t recognize it because it looks like every other grocery bag.

Though this story has a lot more words than the usual picture book, the language is lyrical and makes for a good read-aloud. Plus Kooser includes a couple pages at the end about recycling plastic bags. Did you know that if you use reusable cloth bags instead of plastic bags, you could save over 22,000 plastic bags all by yourself? I didn’t.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Going on a Gall Hike...

2011-11-25T09:35:00.000-05:00

Fall is a great time to look for galls. You’ll find them on twigs and stems – even on fallen oak leaves and amongst the needles at the tips of spruce boughs.

Galls can be round, like the marble galls on oaks. They can be hard or soft. Galls can look like pineapples or tiny dots.

What kinds of galls do you find in your neighborhood? How big are they? Are they at the tips of stems or in the middle? Are they pointed or fuzzy or spiny or smooth?

Is there anybody home? The gall-maker might be inside, but there might be other insects as well. The oak-apple, made by a tiny gall wasp, has been known to house seventy-five different kinds of insects – including parasites on the gall-making insect!

Collect some galls and place them in a jar with a lid or a terrarium with a top. Something’s sure to come out. If you can’t wait, take a sharp knife and slice the gall open – you might find a larva all snuggled up for a winter’s sleep.

Tuesday's View

2011-11-22T08:42:00.000-05:00

Morning frosts melt and keep the grass green

Celebrating Picture Books: Sheila Says We're Weird

2011-11-21T08:04:00.000-05:00

Week three of picture book month features a visit to some neighbors that live life a bit differently from what most kids perceive as “the norm”.

Sheila Says We're Weird

By Ruth Ann Smalley; illus. by Jennifer Emery

Ages 7 - 12

Tilbury House 2011

Sheila’s neighbors don’t toss laundry in the dryer; they hang it on the line. Her neighbors use a push mower, plant a garden and toss used tea bags in the worm bin.

“That’s really, really weird,” Sheila says.

Sheila’s neighbors chop vegetables for soup instead of opening a can. They ride bikes to the library, patch their jeans and rake leaves on top of the garden to protect plants for winter. And it’s all weird, to Sheila. The funny thing is… Sheila never misses an opportunity to pick strawberries from the garden and she never turns down a bowl of hot homemade soup.

By the end of the book Sheila realizes that her neighbors are happy with what they have. And she wants to share! This is a great story to introduce simple things any kid can do to reduce, reuse and recycle. What a great introduction to the concept of “green living”.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Goldenrod Galls

2011-11-18T10:24:00.000-05:00

Past the hickory tree, where we haven’t mowed since last year, grows a patch of goldenrod. Each fall it lives up to its name, producing bright golden flowers that keep the bumblebees and honeybees busy on warm days.

Look closely, though, and you notice weird things on my plants. Some of them have swellings on the stem – as though they swallowed a golf ball. A few have bunches of leaves that resemble flowers, tucked near the tops of stems. These are galls – deformities caused by insects.

Gall flies, moths and midges are responsible for the deformities in goldenrod. The adult insect lays its eggs on the plants. When the larvae hatch, they chew their way into the stem, irritating the goldenrod. In response, the goldenrod develops a swelling (ball gall) or the tight flower-like cluster that keeps the stem from growing.

When the weather grows cold, the larvae enter a state of suspended animation (diapause) and remain that way until spring, when they resume chewing a tunnel to the gall where they’ll pupate.

Over winter, though, a lot can happen to a gall. Downy woodpeckers and chickadees, hungry for protein-rich snacks, may poke a hole into the gall and chow down on the sleeping larvae.

Tuesday's View

2011-11-15T08:44:00.000-05:00

the sky fades before it rains

Celebrating Picture Books: The Green Mother Goose

2011-11-14T11:40:00.000-05:00

We continue celebrating picture book month with a trip to a favorite childhood character – Mother Goose. But this isn’t our grandmother’s goose. This Mama has gone green.

The Green Mother Goose

By Jan Peck and David Davis; illustrated by Carin Berger

Ages 3 – 6

Sterling Publishing, 2011

Everything in this slim green volume has been recycled, from the paper used to create the collage art to the nursery rhymes. Old Mother Hubbard shops with cloth grocery bags, Little Jack Horner changes all the incandescent bulbs to fluorescent and the Old Woman who lived in a Shoe has solar power!

Remember those three mice? Now they…

Search for clothes at the thrift store shops,
Recycle the treasures at yard sale stops,
Catch water from rain and use all the drops.
Three wise mice!

I love Carin Berger’s illustrations created from found papers, ticket stubs, old newspapers and other recycled stuff. Even the pages of the book contain recycled wood and fibers! The book’s subtitle says it all: “Saving the world one rhyme at a time”.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

Counting on Fibonacci

2011-11-11T08:08:00.000-05:00

shadbush

Last week I reviewed Swirl by Swirl, a book about spirals in nature. Continuing on the theme of math patterns in nature ... a long time ago mathematicians noticed that certain numbers show up in nature over and over again. Lilies have three petals. Shadbush and wild roses have five.

The math guys got excited because these numbers belong to a special series called the Fibonacci sequence, and they found them everywhere they looked. Starfish? Five arms. An octopus? Eight. Daisies? Thirteen petals or, in some cases, 21.

The Fibonacci sequence begins like this: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …. And there is definitely a pattern.* If you look around, you can find Fibonacci numbers. Cut open a cucumber or tomato and you find three seed cavities. Slice a pear cross-wise and you get that five-armed star shape – each of those arms is where seeds develop. Red pines have pairs of needles while white pines have clusters of five.

Of course, not everything grows in a Fibonacci pattern; mustards have four petals and star flowers have seven.

*(hint: 1 + 1 = 2; 1 + 2 = 3; 2 + 3 = ?)

Tuesday's View

2011-11-08T08:33:00.000-05:00

Oak leaves are raked. So are the maple and poplar....

but those hickory leaves are so stubborn!

And the beech? Forget about raking beech leaves -

they'll still be clinging to their twigs come spring.

Celebrating Picture Books: Feeding Friendsies

2011-11-07T08:51:00.000-05:00

November is Picture Book Month. I’ll be joining in the celebration each Monday, reviewing fun books that have a science and nature slant. My first book is .....

Feeding Friendsies

By Suzanne Bloom

Ages 2 – 6

Boyds Mills Press 2011

I picked this book for its cover, but mud pie aficionados will pick it for Suzanne Bloom’s playful presentation of fresh-from-the-garden snacks.

“Lolly made a lovely, crunchy lunch from stems and leaves with flowers on top,” writes Bloom. Will she eat it? No – she made it for the butterflies. A pair of Swallowtails, a Monarch, and a Red Admiral flutter above a salad piled high in a gardener’s straw hat.

Through the pages Lolly and her friends whip up delicacies for hoppy frogs and wiggly worms. When Nana finally calls them to lunch they see a table full of garden delights: carrot sticks, blueberries and blackberries, tomatoes fresh off the vine. Will they eat it? “Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes!”

“So what’s your best-ever never-fail mud pie recipe?” I asked Bloom the other day.

Referring to the garden delicacies in her book she answered, “Those are my best recipes for mud pie and dirt dessert. My geologist son, however, has informed me that the correct term is soil, not dirt. But,” she mused, “that just doesn’t have the same ring to it!”

I love Bloom’s books for their reading “fun factor” and Feeding Friendsies is no exception. I also love the way she brings the garden community to life - the butterflies and frogs and chickadees... and Bloom’s watercolors are pure delight.

Review copy provided by the publisher.

STEM Friday - Swirl by Swirl

2011-11-04T07:44:00.000-04:00

Swirl by Swirl: Spirals in Nature

By Joyce Sidman; illustrations by Beth Krommes

40 pages, ages 4-8

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2011

“A spiral is a snuggling shape,” writes Joyce Sidman. “It fits neatly in small places.” With that cozy beginning, Sidman and illustrator Beth Krommes launch us into a closer inspection of spirals in the natural world.

Spirals start out small and get bigger “swirl by swirl”. Sidman’s lyrical prose helps us understand how spirals are strong, protective, expansive. Krommes’ scratchboard illustrations capture the details: a tail twining around a twig; the way a chipmunk curls up to sleep overwinter.

From snail shells to galaxies, from the curl of an ocean wave to the twist of wild wind, spirals are everywhere. Sidman includes a couple pages at the end that explain more about the plants and animals featured in the book and shows how nature and numbers combine in spirally patterns.

I asked Sidman why spirals?

“I’ve always been interested in them,” she said, “why they appear and why we find them beautiful.” The trick, though, was to find a way to write about them…. “I wanted this to be more than a book about shapes. I wanted to understand why spirals work well in nature, in so many circumstances.”

So Sidman read and read and read. She also collected lots of photos and did a lot of thinking. Then, once she grasped the reasons for why spirals occur in nature she began organizing her book.

Even though Krommes was doing her own research for the illustrations, Sidman sent photos. The two sent ideas back and forth and the book grew in a collaborative fashion. “It was a lively, challenging, and unusual way to create a picture book,” Sidman said. “Usually the editor is the only link between author and illustrator; I loved being part of the whole process!”

You can’t help but learn something new when you work on a book. Sidman learned a lot about Fibonacci numbers, she said – but don’t ask her to explain them. The neatest thing she learned? “That butterfly tongues form spirals but frog tongues don’t!”

This is part of the STEM Friday book round-up, hosted at Simply Science. Review copy provided by the publisher.

Tuesday's View

2011-11-01T09:23:00.000-04:00

I love the way the clouds sneak up the valley

early in the morning. This is taken after sunrise

when the sky is still trying on colors for the day.

Looking for Orange Things

2011-10-28T00:58:00.000-04:00

It's almost Halloween - an evening celebrated by ghosts and goblins and things orange: candy corn, pumpkin cookies and jelly beans.

So in keeping with the season I encourage you to head outside with your nature journal and look for Orange Things.

A couple weeks ago I noticed this bright orange fungus. With all our fall rain there was a lush growth of grass and clover beneath it, contrasting green with the bright mushroom cap.

If you're looking for orange leaves, you can't go wrong with Sugar Maples.

photo by Marvin Smith

Marvin Smith, a photographer and blogger in the Ozarks has graciously shared two of his orange critters. The moth on the flower to the right is called a "lichen moth" because the caterpillars munch on crunchy lichens.

photo by Marvin Smith

The spider is a marbled orb weaver -
perfect for Halloween!

Tuesday's View

2011-10-25T08:12:00.000-04:00

Sunny mornings, rain in the afternoons .... snow predicted on Thursday.

Will these leaves be gone by next week?

Tracking Climate Change with Your Nature Journal

2011-10-21T05:33:00.000-04:00

Backyard nature-watchers are teaming up with scientists to track the relationships between climate and plants. This isn’t something new – about 60 years ago Aldo Leopold, who observed the plants and birds and insects on his farm, combed through ten years of journals to see how things had changed over time. He found a correlation between temperature and flower blooming.

Later, his daughter moved back to the family farm and resumed nature journaling. When scientists compared her observations to those of her father, half a century earlier, they discovered that over those decades some plants had begun blooming earlier, and some migratory birds returned earlier. Over that same period of time the earth warmed about two degrees.

The study of periodic plant and animal life cycle events is called “phenology”. It doesn't take much to be a "phenologist" - just a pencil, a notebook and a desire to look closely at the world. You can keep track of plants and animals in your back yard. Who knows? Maybe the notes you keep will help scientists in the future. If you're interested in helping scientists collect data for climate research right now, check out Project BudBurst.

Tuesday's View

2011-10-18T16:28:00.000-04:00

For the past couple decades I've watched the leaves burn scarlet, russet, gold.. and then fade away. I've watched the evening sun paint the far hill with alpenglow and watched snow pile up on the road - all the while thinking: gee, I should document the season's changes. So that's what I'll be doing this year, on Tuesdays - posting a photo of the view from my study window. Starting now, before the last bit of color fades from these gorgeous upstate NY hills. Thanks to Melissa Stewart for inspiring me - this year she's taking cloud portraits.

Catch a Falling Star

2011-10-14T11:03:00.000-04:00

If you missed the Draconid meteor shower last week, don’t despair. Meteorites are continually falling to earth. All day long. The problem is, you don’t see them because most of them are really, really tiny.

But you might be able to catch a few. All you need is a large plastic or aluminum bin (a few inches deep), a magnet and a plastic bag.

Put your star-catching bin someplace high enough so you don’t get Earth dust, but yet easy enough to reach. You’ll want it open to the sky, so avoid overhanging trees. Fill the bin with several inches of water and leave it in place for three or four weeks. Check to make sure there is water in it and add some if you need to.

How long will it take to actually capture a falling star? Give it a month or so. Then bring your container down and set it on a sturdy table. First thing you’ll notice is a lot of sediment in the bottom of the bin. So how do you separate out meteorite bits from dust and pollen?

That’s where the magnet comes in. Put the magnet inside the plastic bag and slowly move it around in the water. Make sure to stir up the sediment on the bottom of the bin. Now pour some water in a clean bowl and put your magnet in that. Take the magnet out of the plastic bag and magnetic meteorite bits will fall into the clean bowl.

Those meteorite bits may have come from the farthest reaches of our solar system. And they may be old – really old, like four billion years or more. So take care of them!

And, if you want to watch stars falling out of the sky this fall, there are still a few more showers coming up. The only problem is that the moon might get in the way of seeing the meteors streak across the sky.

Peak viewing times:

Orionids Oct 21

South Taurids Nov 5

North Taurids Nov 11-12

Leonids Nov 17

Geminids Dec 13

Learn more at Earth & Sky

STEM Friday - The Boy Who Drew Birds

2011-10-06T21:03:00.001-04:00

The Boy Who Drew Birds

By Jacqueline Davies; illus by Melissa Sweet

32 pages, ages 7 – 10

Houghton Mifflin, 2004

This book has everything one could want in a sciency book: luscious artwork (I love collage!), mystery, historical context and wonderful storytelling. I was hooked at page one: “It was true that John James could skate, hunt, and ride better than most boys. True also that he could dance the minuet and gavotte as if he had been born a king.” John James, we learn, can fiddle and fence and flirt – but the thing he likes to do best is watch birds.

Even though birds have four legs too few, I had to keep reading. Who is this John James? And what is it about birds that intrigues him so?

But what really hooked me was that the story centered around Audubon’s observations of the eastern phoebe – a bird that, over the past dozen years, we have been watching closely because a pair built its nest just beneath my study window. And, as John James learned, they return spring after spring, with kids in tow.

The mystery is where birds go in winter. We know they migrate, but back in 1804 scientists thought they hibernated underwater. Or flew to the moon. The other mystery is whether they return to their home each spring – a mystery Audubon solved with a silver thread.

We think of Audubon as an artist. But clearly, he was a natural scientist as well – even though he didn’t fare well within the confines of a classroom.

Like Audubon, author Jacqueline Davies was inspired by the phoebe. “I met my first phoebe during a nature walk with my daughter," she says. "I was intrigued by the idea of a bird that returns to the same nest year after year.” When she delved into research, she learned that Audubon was the first person to band a bird in this country and that the bird was the phoebe. That’s when she knew she had to write the story.

Davies read lots of biographies about Audubon, as well his own writing. But she didn’t make it to visit his Pennsylvania home until after her book was published.

During those three months of research, Davies says she learned lots of new things. “The most engrossing,” she says, was reading the scientific theories of Audubon’s day that explained where birds go in the winter. “Those theories offered great insight into not only what they knew but also the accepted practices of the day for making scientific discoveries,” Davies said.

While Davies doesn’t keep a life list, she does keep a pair of binoculars at the ready in her upstairs bathroom. “It’s the perfect spot for watching all the bird activity in my backyard,” she explained.

This is part of STEM Friday, hosted at Celebrate Science. Review copy provided by Tompkins County Public Library in Ithaca.

Salamanders in The Garden

2011-09-30T09:11:00.000-04:00

We often find newts in our garden. Red-spotted newts hiding in the mulch or laboriously crawling towards the shade cast by towering cosmos. But last week, while harvesting potatoes, we unearthed two salamanders. They were long – mostly tail – with stubby legs and glistened deep red, almost black.

At first glance salamanders look a lot like lizards, but they are amphibians. Like frogs. Salamanders have moist, often slimy skin with no scales. They use that moist skin to breathe. And while lizards have scratchy toenails (claws), salamanders do not.

Salamanders need moisture, and after all the rain we got last month – a record 12 inches on our hill – the garden beds were just the right soggy-ness for them. The crawled under the mulch and dug into the wet soil of the potato hills – the perfect salamander home until hungry gardeners came along…

This fall as you pull out the weeds and get your garden ready for winter, pay attention to the small critters living there. And, if you can, leave a few big rocks and some cover for shelter.

Go on a Pattern Hike

2011-09-23T00:20:00.000-04:00

If you’re looking for a way to connect math to nature, start paying attention to patterns. Patterns are lines or shapes that repeat – and you can find them just about everywhere you look: the back of a caterpillar, butterfly wings, the way a wasp’s nest is built or the honeycomb of a bee hive.

There are patterns in the way clouds gather in the sky, and the V’s geese make as they fly.

There are patterns left by waves on the beach, and by snakes on the desert sand. Look closely at a cactus and you’ll find a pattern in how the spines come out; same thing for pine needles.

There are patterns in rocks and trees – and even in the food you eat. Ever cut an apple across the middle and see the star inside? Take a closer look at blueberries and you’ll see that same star pattern at the blossom end of the fruit.

So, next time you head outside go on a “pattern hunt”. Take along a journal or camera and record the neat patterns you find.

What to share the patterns you find? Just send a low-resolution photo to sueheaven at gmail dot com and I’ll post them here (it might take a couple days).

STEM Friday: You are Older than the Stars!

2011-09-15T22:33:00.003-04:00

Welcome to STEM Friday – that’s where we share nifty nonfiction that focuses on science, technology, engineering and math. You’ll find links to more reviews below. But first, a book I love – and brief chat with the author.

Older than the Stars

By Karen C. Fox, illus. by Nancy Davis

32 pages; ages 5-10

Charlesbridge 2010

This is a book that begins with a bang. Karen Fox hangs her tale of how the universe began on the structure of a nursery rhyme: “This is the star of red-hot stuff that burst from the gas in a giant puff that spun from the blocks that formed from the bits that were born in the bang when the world began.”

Early stellar chaos, well-illustrated with Nancy Davis’s bright potato prints and computer graphics, eventually resolves into form: planets, earth, plants, animals, and people. Fox shows how matter created in the big bang gets recycled over the eons – now some of that primordial stardust may be inside of each one of us.

Fun as it is, Fox includes plenty of sidebars explaining what scientists know about how the universe formed. Not only are the sidebars kid-friendly, but they put the story on two reading levels. She concludes with a not-to-scale timeline of the universe and a glossary of useful terms.

Fox, it turns out, has a degree in physics and English. “I had always meant to be a physics major,” she says, “but I was also a constant reader, so … I registered for a double major.” She was inspired to write this book when she saw a call for astronomy picture book ideas. Fox had just finished a book for adults and thought it would be a breeze to take all that information and make a kids book on the big bang. “The joke was on me,” she says. “This book took much longer to get to print than any of my adult books!”

I asked Fox how she came to structure her book like “the house that Jack built”. The initial draft had some repetition in it, she said. “But it wasn’t until the third draft that I realized that of course the book was supposed to be a poem. The whole book just sort of came together after that.” It was, she said, an excellent lesson in why good writing almost always requires lots of re-writing – and a good editor.

Was Fox surprised by the bold prints that accompany her science story? “I submitted all kinds of realistic images with my first draft,” she says. But once her editors sent a portfolio of Davis’s artwork, “I agreed that her style seemed fun in a way that would lend itself to illustrating some far out concepts.”

Every writer learns something when they write. Fox says, “I never knew that stars only make the first handful of light elements. It takes explosions as big as supernovae to fuse those atoms into the big stuff like gold and iron.”

Here's what other people are reviewing today:

Jeff Barger reviews How Does My Garden Grow over at NC Teacher Stuff where you can find lots of book reviews on everything from art to sports.

Over at Simply Science Shirley Duke reviews the newly released Kingfisher Science Encyclopedia. she says it's got a great technology section.

Anastasia Suen warms up our day with a review of Geology of the Desert Southwest: Investigate How the Earth Was Formed with 15 Projects at Chapter Book of the Day.

NOTE for STEM Friday reviewers: If you have difficulty leaving comments, please email me your link at sueheaven at gmail dot com.

Heading South: Monarchs on Migration

2011-09-10T16:09:00.000-04:00

Last month a monarch caterpillar found a nice cozy spot under a cabbage leaf and decided to pupate there. It walked a fair distance before finding shelter, because the nearest patch of milkweed is a football field's length away.

After 24 hours it had changed into a chrysalis.It was well protected from wind and weather and, apparently, anything interested in munching on chrysalides. Not to mention that the chrysalis blended well with the color of the cabbage leaf...

Now it’s waiting to join the vast Monarch migration southward, to Mexico – which, given where we live (42nd parallel) should peak over the next two weeks.

If you live south of the 45th parallel, now’s the time to start paying attention to Monarch butterflies. Scientists are interested in them and you can help by gluing tags on Monarchs you catch in your neighborhood. It’s a great way to spend sunny autumn days with your children and helps scientists learn more about these butterflies. You can learn more at Monarch Watch.

Decoding Firefly Flash Codes

2011-09-01T11:38:00.000-04:00

photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/theloushe/3622541416

If you missed the meteor showers due to rain or moonlight, don’t despair – you can catch the nightly firefly shows. Fireflies fill the dark spaces between the stars with their blinking lights. Watch them long enough and you begin to see that there are different flash patterns. Some fireflies blink many times in quick succession, dit-dit-ditting a zigzag through the dark. Others flash a couple of long, slow blinks and pause, as though waiting for a response. Perhaps they are; within seconds flash-code messages are returned from the tall grass.

With as many as 20 to 30 species in our region, all sharing the same habitat, the nighttime airwaves can get crowded with messages. To reduce confusion, each species has developed its own unique flash code. One species might signal with a long flash followed by two short flashes, while another uses three flashes in a row.

Just as important as what fireflies say is how they say it. Some species hover in place as they flash; others write their love messages in glowing curves as they fly. While some fireflies flash their love messages early in the evening, others don’t even file their flight plans until the night’s half over.

Fireflies divide the night sky spatially as well. Some species fly low, right over the grasses, to flash their messages. Others fly at shrub-height, and even others fly among the treetops. Then there’s color – some fireflies flash greenish-yellow while others produce an orange glow.

To find out more about the fireflies in your back yard all you need is a notebook and pencil, a flashlight covered with blue cellophane (fireflies don’t see blue) and a warm night for watching. Spend a few minutes watching the lights, then jot some notes down. If you can distinguish individual fireflies you might be able to decode their flash patterns. Some of the things you’ll want to keep track of are the colors of the flashes, the pattern (length of flashes), how many flashes are in a series and the interval of time between flashes. If you don’t have a stopwatch you can count seconds by saying “one fire fly, two fire fly…”

You will also want to note such things as time of night you see that particular pattern, how high the male flies and what his flight pattern is, where you saw the responding female, and the temperature.

For more on fireflies, check out Firefly Facts

Creating Pollinator-Friendly Yards

2011-08-26T09:04:00.001-04:00

If you want native bees and butterflies to visit your yard, the first thing you need to do is reduce or eliminate your use of pesticides. Instead of spraying chemicals, find other ways to control weeds and insect pests in your garden and yard. Scientists have shown that native bee populations drop by around 50 percent where insecticides have been sprayed. Bumblebees are paralyzed by neonicotinoids – a class of widely used insecticides that act on the nervous system of insects – at levels as low as 12 parts per billion.

Provide as diverse, natural landscape as you can. Are there sections of your property that you can let go a bit wild for the summer and mow once a year? Think about planting native shrubs and trees – they not only enhance the habitat for bees but can add value to your landscaping. Native bees, it turns out, like to forage close to home. While honeybees readily fly two miles to collect nectar and pollen, wild bees rarely fly over 1/2 mile.

Bees depend on nectar for food throughout the entire summer. So think about planting things that bloom over the entire season. Check out the list of flowers bees love below.

Bees also need a source of water. They use water to cool their hives and dilute the honey they feed to their larvae. On extremely hot days, bees might spend more time carrying water back to the hive than foraging for pollen and nectar. Birdbaths work, but make sure the water is shallow, as bees can drown. You can also put a rock or a floating bit of wood in deeper water to provide a place for thirsty bees to land on.

Wild bees need nesting sites. Most of them are solitary, and about a third of them build their nests in wood. They tunnel into the soft pithy centers of some twigs (raspberry canes and sumac) or use tunnels left behind by wood-boring beetle larvae. The other 70 percent are ground-nesters, digging narrow tunnels down to small chambers of brood cells. Ground-nesting bees need direct access to the soil surface and prefer sloped or well-drained sites. Bumblebees, too, build their colonies underground, moving into abandoned rodent burrows.

Encouraging wood-nesting bees can be as simple as retaining dead or dying trees and branches in the hedgerows and encouraging the growth of elderberry, blackberries and raspberries, sumac and dogwood. To attract ground-nesters, leave a small area untilled for a year or actively clear some of the vegetation from a gently sloping or flat area.

Flowers Bees Love

Red maple, chives, Shadbush/ serviceberry, asters, borage, bee plant (Cleome), cosmos, purple coneflower, Joe-pye weed, sunflowers, hyssop, apple blossoms, mints, bergamot/ bee balm (Monarda), basil, oregano, poppies, plum and cherry blossoms, roses, willows, sage, goldenrod, dandelion, thyme, red clover, blueberries, mullein, zinnias.

You can learn more about bee-friendly gardening here.

Following Bumblebees

2011-08-19T07:54:00.000-04:00

Bumblebees are fun to watch and, when they're collecting pollen in a bunch of flowers, they're pretty easy to follow. But once they load up and head for home they fly too fast and too high to follow. And when another bee shows up on those flowers later, I always wonder if it's the same bee or a new one.

The bumblebees on my sunflowers are so focused on collecting pollen that I could put a dot of paint or white-out on their backs (thorax) and they might not notice. Then at least I would know whether the same ones come back day after day.

But wouldn't it be cool if we could glue little radio-tracking devices on them and follow them around? Some scientists in London have done just that.Scientists have also glued tiny radar transponders onto bees and followed them with radar. They discovered that bees fly faster than they thought (about 30 miles per hour) and farther (up to 12 miles). And yes, they do indeed make "bee lines" home.

Here's a video from BBC's wildlife show "Animal Camera" hosted by Steve Leonard.

Natives in the Garden

2011-08-12T07:27:00.000-04:00

It's been five years since honeybees started dying in large numbers across the country. Scientists are still trying to figure out why and what they can do about it. Eric Mussen, a university extension bee specialist at the University of California at Davis, says that beekeepers are still losing, on average, 30 percent or more of their colonies each year. Not everywhere, of course, but in enough places to make Colony Collapse Disorder a continuing puzzle.

Meanwhile, some farmers are wondering whether – and how – they can get native bees to take up the slack. There are more than 4,000 species of native bees in North America, ranging from the size of a fruit fly to nearly three inches long. Like their honeybee cousins, native bees work hard to gather pollen to feed their young and, in the process pollinate such crops as tomatoes, eggplant, watermelons and other melons, zucchini, cucumbers, winter squash and pumpkins. They also pollinate strawberries, raspberries and blueberries.

Native bees, it turns out, work harder than their honeybee cousins. Squash bees get up earlier in the morning and bumblebees keep working in cold and wet weather. Not only that, but it takes only 250 blue orchard bees (Osmia) to pollinate an acre of apple trees – a job that would normally require 15,000 – 20,000 honeybees.

Native bees also make honeybees work harder. Scientists studying pollinators on hybrid sunflowers discovered that when wild native bees were around, honeybees were up to five times more efficient in pollinating the sunflowers. Apparently the natives made the domesticated bees nervous, causing the honeybees to switch flowers more frequently.

So, how do farmers attract those hard-working natives to their farms?

“We let things go a little wild,” says Teresa Vanek of Red Tail Farm in Trumansburg, NY. She and her partner raise bees and sell the honey. They also grow a diversity of vegetables on their four-acre organic farm. So they make sure there are lots of flowers growing on their farm to provide nectar for bees.

When harvesting broccoli and related crops they leave older plants in the beds to flower, instead of pulling them out and tossing them in the compost. Bees love the yellow and white flowers produced by arugula, radishes, mustards and broccoli-raab. They also let their cover crops –buckwheat, white clover and red clover – go to flower and plant blocks of sunflowers to attract the pollinators.

Does it work? “We have a lot of wild bees,” Vanek said, noting that bumblebees and sweat bees are abundant on her crops.

A True Science Mystery: The Hive Detectives

2011-08-05T07:42:00.001-04:00

Hive Detectives: Chronicle of a Honey Bee Catastrophe

Written by Loree Griffin Burns, photos by Ellen Harasimowicz

80 pages, for ages 9 and up

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010

I confess: I love bees – though not their stingers. And I love HMH’s “Scientist in the Field” series. So when Hive Detectives came out I knew I had to review it. After meeting the author, I knew I had to interview her, too. Today you get both.

This book is a mystery – after all, we still don’t know exactly what caused millions of honeybees to die off. Loree Burns deftly weaves the thrill of honeybee “crime scene investigation” with the science of bees and pollination in this well-crafted and readable story about Colony Collapse Disorder. The photography (mostly by Ellen Harasimowicz) is stunning and puts us right there in the thick of the action.

The book opens with Mary, a hobbyist beekeeper, heading out to check her hives. Honeybees are gentle, Burns assures us, though later she admits to being stung five times while researching the book. (Four of those were intentional – she was trying to get a photo of the stinger, she says.)

Then Burns introduces us to Dave Hackenberg, a commercial beekeeper who manages 3,000 hives. In a normal year he follows the season, trucking hives to almond orchards in California in February so the bees can pollinate the trees and then to citrus groves, apple orchards and even the blueberry fields in Maine. It’s a lot of traveling for his bees, so after a busy season he heads to Florida to give his bees a well-deserved rest.

And that’s where we meet Dave: in Florida, in November of 2006 when he discovers that 20 million of his bees have vanished. Gone. No dead bodies or evidence of attack by pests or anything. Nothing.

How do millions of bees just disappear? That’s what Burns sets out to discover, and in her search she introduces us to the team of scientists who investigated what became known as Colony Collapse Disorder – CCD for short. Just like the detectives on CSI, the bee scientists collect evidence: pollen, wax and brood from the hives and any dead bees they find. They conduct bee autopsies, search for viruses and mites and any other causes of disease. The biggest challenge they face: most of the bees from the collapsing hives are never found. It’s hard to do science on something that is not there.

One of the things I like about this book – aside from the great appendix and resources at the back – is that Burns ends her story by returning to Mary’s backyard bee hives. “The story about Colony Collapse Disorder is unfinished,” Burns says. “We still don’t know what causes it, and it has killed a lot of bees for many years now. I didn’t want to end with the unknown and sinister; I wanted to end with hope. Bringing readers back into the hives of Mary, a backyard beekeeper whose bees are doing well despite CCD, was a way to do that.”

Because it’s a mystery story I asked Burns about how she incorporated the element of solving a puzzle.

“Every book I write feels like a puzzle that needs solving. For months and months, my job is to soak up information: I read books and articles, interview experts and spend time familiarizing myself with the topic and the techniques used to study it in the field. I immerse myself completely, and by the end of the research phase of the project, I have what feels like thousands of pieces with which to tell the story. The process begins, for me, with figuring out how to fit those pieces together into a satisfying story that will resonate with readers and keep them turning the pages.”

Burns even attended Bee School!

Colony Collapse Disorder was discovered five years ago. Has any new research come out since Hive Detectives was published?

“There have been many interesting reports, including a study that looked more closely at the effect of cell phones on honey bee health,” says Burns. “But the bottom line is that no single factor has yet been shown to cause CCD in honey bees. Scientists still believe the disorder is the result of multiple factors that weaken bees in combination, including pesticide exposure, hive pests, viruses, and poor diet.”

So what can children and their families do to protect honeybees and native bees?

“The most important thing any of us can do,” says Burns, “is to protect land from development and from pesticides. Bees need chemical-free places to forage and nest, and this includes lawns and gardens.” She also suggested that people get involved in helping scientists better understand honey bees and other pollinator species – check out The Great Sunflower Project.

After learning so much about bees, Burns wants to keep hives of my own. “There is something about working with bees that makes me feel peaceful and satisfied,” she said. “The view into the daily lives of a family of social insects is interesting, the benefit to my garden is undeniable, and the honey is a sweet bonus.” She doesn’t have her own hives yet, but has the next best thing – neighbors who keep bees. “Their bees work my gardens, I help them with beekeeping chores if they need it, and we are all in honey year round,” she says. Pretty sweet.

You can find out more about Loree Burns at www.loreeburns.com. This post is part of a new book round-up called STEM Friday (Science Technology Engineerting & Math) hosted today at NC Teacher Stuff. On August 8 we'll go drop in on the Nonfiction Monday Round-Up hosted this week by Apple With Many Seeds. Review copy of Hive Detectives provided by the publisher.

Counting on Bees

2011-07-30T06:13:00.000-04:00

pollen-covered bee on sunflower

For the last couple of summers I’ve been participating in the Great Sunflower Project. It doesn’t take much time – only 15 minutes each day I observe (I aim for 2 days a week) – and it allows me to become personally acquainted with the bees in my neighborhood. There are quite a few: fat & fuzzy bumblebees, carpenter bees, metallic green bees, tiny sweat bees, honeybees from my neighbor’s hives (located down the road and around the corner) and more.

Bees, it turns out, are easy to watch. They are so intent on their labors – slurping nectar and gathering pollen to take back to their hives or nests – that they pay no attention to a sunburned gardener tallying sightings on a dog-eared index card. This is good, because one of every three bites I stuff into my mouth comes from plants pollinated by wild bees.

Gretchen LeBuhn, a scientist at San Francisco State University, invites curious naturalists across the nation to help her learn more about the free “ecosystem services” that wild bees provide – free pollinating services worth at least four billion dollars a year. And that’s just in the US.

Scientists have noted pollinator decline in certain wild and agricultural landscapes. But, says LeBuhn, little is known about urban pollinators. Her most recent data suggests that urban bee populations may be on the slide as well.

While the loss of these pollinators is important, LeBuhn says it is more important to understand what effect these losses have had on pollinator services. To do that she and other scientists need to know a lot more about how healthy bee populations survive in cities and suburbs. Her ideas is to have as many people as possible help her count bees.

So far, she’s learned that on average a gardener is likely to see a bee pollinate a flower every 2.6 minutes. This means that if you’re seeing more than 3 bees in 15 minutes your garden is doing better than average.

It’s easy to get involved and you don’t even need a garden – you can count bees on flowers at a park or botanical garden. To learn more go to http://www.greatsunflower.org
If you want to watch a bee at work, check out this video from You-tube:

Stars Falling Out of the Sky

2011-07-25T14:29:00.001-04:00

This summer the Perseid shower is going to be hard to see because the full moon will obscure all but the brightest meteors. Don’t despair, though – according to the EarthSky folks there will be stars falling out of the sky for the next two weeks while the moon is dark.

OK – not real stars falling out of the sky, but meteors – small bits of rock bits from crumbling comets or other space debris that streak through the atmosphere as they speed earthward. Some of them move at a mighty clip, a couple hundred miles per hour or faster. Most of them burn up before they hit the ground, but in 1982 a 6-pound meteorite hit a house in Connecticut. Scientists figure it was traveling more than 1,000 miles per hour.

One of the biggest dents left by a meteorite is in Winslow,Arizona. About 50,000 years ago a chunk of asteroid traveling 26,000 miles per hour collided with the earth. It left a crater nearly one mile wide and more than 500 feet deep.

Most meteorites are small, leaving only a streak in the sky. From now through August 4 you’ll have a chance to see a few, maybe 15 to 20 an hour. Though they come out of the southern sky, near Pegasus, they’ll arc across the sky so you should be able to see them even if you can’t find the constellation. Best sky-watching time is between midnight and dawn.

Butterfly Season

2011-07-17T06:36:00.001-04:00

Baltimore Checkerspot

A couple posts ago I mentioned a chrysalis I’d found – a Baltimore Checkerspot. The adult emerged on July 4, Independence Day for everyone I guess. When I got home from the parade it was hanging out on my porch, drying its wings.

Now I see Baltimore Checkerspots everywhere, checking out the milkweeds and Black-eyed Susans growing wild in my garden. This time of year they’re also checking out egg-laying sites: the narrow-leaved English plantain and the common plantain that make up lots of what passes for my lawn. Their caterpillars – orange-and-black-banded with black spines sticking out – will nosh on plantain leaves until fall and then they’ll find a cozy spot beneath the leaf litter to spend the winter.

Meanwhile, the Checkerspots and other butterflies are flitting about collecting nectar. If you sneak up close, you can watch them unroll their long tongues to reach the nectar in flowers. They also spend a fair amount of time basking in the sun – the Baltimore Checkerspots hold their wings open so you can see their beautiful colors.

Butterflies also hang out in “puddle clubs”. You can see them at the edges of mud puddles, usually a whole bunch of them, and it looks like they’re licking the mud. That’s how they get the minerals they need.

Besides the Baltimore Checkerspot, here are a few of the other butterflies people are finding in back yards of upstate NY:

Eastern Tiger Swallowtail

Black Swallowtails

Eastern Tailed-Blue

Summer Azure

White Admiral

Pearl Crescents

Orange Sulphur

Common Wood-Nymphs

Silver-spotted Skippers

Dun skippers

Great Spangled Fritillary

Monarchs

European Skippers

Bronze Coppers

Banded Hairstreak

What do you see in your back yard?
If you're looking to get involved with butterfly projects, check out project Butterfly Wings, Monarch larva and journey north projects - links are listed under "Get Involved in Real Science" in one of the right-hand columns.

Nonfiction Monday: A Butterfly is Patient

2011-07-09T14:55:00.002-04:00

A Butterfly is Patient

By Dianna Hutts Aston; illustrated by Sylvia Long

32 pages, for ages 4 -10

Chronicle Books, 2011

I loved An Egg is Quiet and A Seed is Sleepy. So when I learned that Dianna Aston and Sylvia Long were teaming up for a butterfly project, I knew I had to get my hands on this book! The art is awesome, the writing wonderful – A Butterfly is Patient is definitely a book that will draw children back for second and fifth looks.

The front spread shows a diversity of caterpillars: some smooth and green, some black with red spikes, some long-horned, others fat with eyespots, and some with thin cactus-like spines. At the end of the book the last spread features the adult butterflies: small blues, bright oranges, spotted and dotted and eye-spotted butterflies and even some with zebra stripes.

And the pages in between? That’s where you learn about a butterfly’s life. “It begins as an egg beneath an umbrella of leaves…” writes Aston. In lyrical prose she accurately details the life cycle from caterpillar through metamorphosis to adult.

She also shows how butterflies help flowers by carrying pollen from one flower to another, and how butterflies protect themselves using camouflage (wings that resemble dried leaves) or boasting bright colors that warn predators it tastes yucky.

A couple weeks ago I interviewed both the author and the illustrator.

Dianna Aston, who wrote the book, said that butterflies hold special symbolism for her – especially yellow butterflies that help her remember her father. On the fifth anniversary of his death, Aston was visiting a remote village in Mexico. “Suddenly, a blizzard of yellow butterflies rose and swirled around me,” she said.

Aston does a lot of research for her books: reading articles, watching butterflies and putting some beneath a microscope to get a closer look. She learns new things every time she writes. While working on A Butterfly is Patient she discovered butterfly “puddle clubs”. One day at a pond she saw “butterflies of every size and color feasting on the minerals in the mud,” she said. “They let me hold them and walk around with them … I felt as if they trusted me.”

Artists do research too. Sylvia Long says she’s lucky because one of her friends builds temporary enclosures around the butterfly pupae (chrysalides) that she finds in her garden – and Long got to observe them up close. Once the butterflies emerge, she removes the enclosures so they can fly free.

The paintings, Long says, are watercolors and she paints them the size they’ll be in the book. Butterflies may be patient – but they don’t sit still long enough for a painter to capture them on paper. So Long used photos to help her illustrate the book.

“Each illustration goes through so many stages,” she explains. She begins with research, looking for imagery to complement the text. “Then I do rough sketches and often many revisions before finally doing an approved, detailed pencil or ink drawing prior to painting with watercolors.” Long, a full-time illustrator, says such detailed nonfiction books take about a year to complete.

The best part about researching A Butterfly is Patient, says Long, was spending weeks searching out photos of the most intriguing and gorgeous butterflies. She learned a lot about metamorphosis – and monarch migration, too.

“An adult Monarch makes the whole 3,000 mile trip [to Mexico] and then stays for the winter,” Long said. “That’s incredible enough, but the return trip along the same route is made by four or five successive generations of Monarchs! How is the route information transferred to the next generation? An intriguing mystery, don’t you think?”

This post is part of the Nonfiction Monday Round-Up hosted this week by proseandkahn; review copy provided by the publisher.

Waiting for Wings: life inside a chrysalis

2011-07-03T18:08:00.000-04:00

While weeding the onions I discovered this tiny chrysalis. The neighborhood butterfly expert says it’s a Baltimore Checkerspot – a butterfly that has mostly black wings (with some white spots) that are rimmed with orange. I’d seen them flying around, and even caught sight of one of the bristly caterpillars hanging out on plantain – a weed I was pulling from the onion beds.

I want to watch the butterfly emerge, so I taped the onion leaf to a protected area on my porch. Every day I run out to check it, to see if “my checkerspot” has got its wings.

A chrysalis is the “pupa” of the butterfly. The caterpillar (larvae) spins a silk pad on the underside of a leaf – or in this case, an onion leaf shaded by weeds – and then hangs upside down and begins changing form.

What we see on the outside is this: the case that holds the metamorphosing butterfly within. It may look as though it’s resting, but there are a lot of changes going on inside. The caterpillar's tissues break down and completely reorganize.

Groups of cells, called “imaginal disks” give rise to things like wings. Or legs. Even antennae. The dissolving caterpillar provides a nutrient-rich fluid for these cells. They begin growing really fast, differentiating into muscles, heart, nervous system.

All this happens inside the chrysalis – so when the butterfly is finished forming and ready to emerge, there’s a lot of waste products in there too. That’s the reddish-colored liquid that sloshes out after the butterfly emerges.

If you go hunting chrysalides (that’s more than one chrysalis), make sure you check protected spots: the undersides of leaves, shady stems, even the sides of rock walls. You can make a net cage to protect chrysalides from predators, but make sure you’re around to release the adults once they emerge and have dried their wings.

Nonfiction Monday: Up, Up & Away!

2011-06-26T09:49:00.002-04:00

Up, Up and Away

Written by Ginger Wadsworth, illustrated by Patricia J. Wynne

32 pages, for ages 4 - 9

Charlesbridge, 2009

I have lots of spiders in my garden – hairy wolf spiders the size of quarters, nursery-web spiders that protect their eggs, and bright yellow and black garden spiders with zig-zaggy designs in their webs. But one sight I have yet to see is hundreds of tiny spiderlings riding air currents on their skinny silk parachutes.

So I’m glad that Ginger Wadsworth and Patricia Wynne teamed up to show how baby spiders travel by flying Up, Up and Away. Spiderlings spin silk draglines that catch the breeze – and because the baby spiders are so lightweight they’re carried into the air. It’s called “ballooning”, and they ride the air currents until evening when the air cools and drops them onto field or forest or your back yard.

I asked Wadsworth what inspired this book. “I’ve always been fascinated with the ballooning spiders I encountered in my garden,” she said. “Also, the concept of moving away and finding a new home, whether for a spider or for a child, is a universal theme.” Wadsworth credits her penpal, Adirondack naturalist Ed Kanze, with inspiring her. “He wrote about how far ballooning spiders might travel, and that column stuck with me!”

Wadsworth’s book follows the adventures of one young spider who manages to avoid becoming lunch for a lizard and evades the pointy end of a hungry bird’s beak. After landing on a fence near a farm, the young spider begins spinning a web. “Without a single lesson she knows what to do,” Wadsworth writes.

All spring and summer the spider builds webs and catches dinner. “She bites her prey with powerful jaws and sucks up juicy beetle guts …” M-M good! After mating, the spider lays her eggs, wraps them in silk and dies, as every mother spider must do. But life goes on. Her babies hatch out and wait for spring when they, too will fly up, up and away.

Wadsworth admits that she learned a lot about spiders while working on the book. But with thousands of species inhabiting our planet, she felt she had to focus on one kind for the story. “I chose the garden spider because of their beautiful webs, and because they are so common that children might spot them in a park or garden,” she says. “Plus they are gorgeous-looking spiders.”

What people don’t know is that spiders are really fragile creatures, Wadworth explained. When she was working on her book, Rachel Carson, Voice for the Earth, she read how Carson carried spiders outside to release them. “Now we have a rule in our household that everyone is expected to gently wrap a spider in a paper towel or piece of Kleenex and carry it out,” Wadsworth says. “Or they can ask me to do it.”

A great book for kids who want to learn more about the secret life of spiders, with delightful illustrations.

This post is part of the Nonfiction Monday Round-Up hosted this week by Wendie’s Wanderings; review copy from the shelves of Candor Free Library. Click here to watch the book trailer at Wadsworth's website.

Make a Back Yard Field Guide

2011-06-18T16:26:00.000-04:00

One of the neat things about science is that you can walk out your back door and learn something new. One fall my kids dug through the compost bin looking for isopods (roly-polies, plant lice) for some studies they wanted to conduct. In the process they uncovered a lot of interesting stuff: worms, centipedes, sprouting seeds.... enough to make cataloging the compost pile that day's study.

Another week we decided to take a closer look at the insects living in the milkweed patch, and later we examined the insects hanging around goldenrod.

In the process we collected notes and sketches of our observations in a sun-faded blue notebook that resided on the windowsill where we watched birds. Over the years our "Window Ledger" grew into a field guide.

I wish I'd taken the next step: snap photos of the things we observed (and the kids holding frogs, kneeling in the garden to watch spiders), print the pages, punch holes and stick into a binder. You can get some good ideas about creating your own field guide from "Flora, Fauna and Family Togetherness"in this month's National Wildlife magazine.

How Many Eggs Can a Monarch Lay?

2011-06-12T19:00:00.000-04:00

Monarch laying an egg (photo by Rick Bunting)

Back in 2007 Jim Edson, from the University of Arkansas counted and came up with 326. Of course, he says, the butterfly could have laid some eggs on her journey north from Mexico….

Last week Rick Bunting, a butterfly watcher in Upstate NY happened to have his camera handy when a female Monarch was laying eggs. Monarch eggs are tiny – about 1/8 inch long – and the butterfly glues each one individually to the underside of a milkweed leaf with a quick-drying substance she secretes along with the egg.

It takes about a handful of days (from 3 to 5) for the egg to hatch. The tiny larva (caterpillar) eats what’s left of the egg, then begins munching milkweed leaves. As it eats, it grows. When it gets too big for its skin, the caterpillar molts and then eats its old skin. After it molts about four times, the larva is ready to turn into an adult butterfly. It stops eating and finds a protected branch where it can pupate.

The caterpillar spins a bit of silk and attaches its hind end to a branch. Then it hangs head down and turns into a jade green chrysalis. The chrysalis is hard, and protects the caterpillar-changing-into-butterfly for nearly two weeks. During that time the caterpillar dissolves and reorganizes its body into an adult butterfly.

Karen Oberhauser a professor at the University of Minnesota, answers lots of questions about the butterflies. One person asked how to increase the number of eggs and caterpillars that survive to maturity (the butterfly stage). Should she try to control predators?

Not really, said Oberhauser. The most important thing to do she said, is to create and preserve habitat – and avoid the use of pesticides that can harm them. Global warming may make this more challenging. According to the models, Oberhauser said that monarch overwintering sites are likely to become much wetter than they are now. That’s because of more frequent storms, she says. The model indicates current summer habitat will become too hot, so the Monarchs may need to move farther north for breeding.

The Sound of Hummingbird Wings

2011-06-05T14:58:00.001-04:00

from US Fish & Wildlife

I was in the garden yanking weeds when I heard the soft whirring of hummingbird wings. A ruby-throated hummer hovered above the chives, a splash of red and emerald amongst the pale amethyst of the earliest blossoms.

Hummingbirds are amazing for so many reasons: they can fly up, down, backwards and sideways; they can stop in midair; they rival the Blue Angels for aerial displays. For such small creatures – only 3 to 4 inches long and so light you could mail about ten of them for the price of a first class stamp – ruby-throated hummingbirds are amazingly strong. During migration they fly about 600 miles.

But back to their wings. A ruby-throated hummingbird beats its wings more than 50 times a second. I could probably flap my arms 50 times a minute – but not long enough to fly 600 miles south for the winter.(Some hummingbirds migrate much farther!)

And it’s the wings that make that wonderful whirring distinctive to hummingbirds. It’s soft, but strong enough to hear amidst the buzzing of bees and rustle of leaves in the breeze.

This week listen to wing sounds: the drone of bumblebees, the flutter of moths against the screen, the sound of chickadee wings as they flit by. By the end of the week you may even be able to identify the kinds of bees in your yard by the pitch of their buzzing.

For more amazing facts about ruby-throated hummingbirds – and to listen to wing sounds – visit Cornell’s All About Birds.

More Dandelion Discoveries

2011-05-22T08:16:00.000-04:00

It didn't take long for my dandelions to go to seed. One of the things you discover, when you take a closer look at dandelions, is that each of those "petals" is actually a flower. And each of those flowers produces a seed. And each of those seeds is able to grow into a new dandelion plant that will ... produce more flowers!

A few things to wonder about dandelions:

how tall can they grow?
how many flowers can each plant produce?
how many seeds are there in a puffball head?
how many thin filaments in each fluffy "parachute"?
how far can a seed/parachute travel?
how long does it take for a seed to turn into a new dandelion plant?
how much does a yellow dandelion flower weigh? how much does a fluffy seed head weigh?
does anything eat dandelion seeds? what do they taste like?

Nonfiction Monday: Seabird in the Forest

2011-05-15T12:19:00.000-04:00

Seabird in the Forest

Written and illustrated by Joan Dunning

32 pages, for ages 5-10

Boyds Mills Press 2011

How does a seabird come to nest in old growth forests miles inland from the pacific? Joan Dunning reveals the secret life of the marbled murrelet, a bird that spends most of its time on the water. But for two months of the year a murrelet pair flies inland to nest, laying a single egg. Once the chick hatches the parents take turns flying back to the sea – sometimes as far as 50 miles – to catch supper.

As Joan writes about the murrelet she also tells about the amazing ecosystem high in the canopy of old growth firs. Hundreds of feet in the air seeds sprout into huckleberry bushes and ferns create thick mats that collect water from the fog. There are flying squirrels, bats, and salamanders that never crawl beyond their home tree – creatures Joan captures in illustrations so layered with depth and texture that you forget for a moment that you’re not actually in an ancient forest.

Earlier this month I asked Joan about the art she created for Seabird in the Forest. She illustrated her previous books with watercolor paintings. “Initially,” Joan said, “I imagined that I would do this one in watercolors as well, but the paintings seemed too light-weight in comparison to the forest. I wanted to represent the complexity of the canopy ecosystem.” The layers of oil paint allow her to do that. “When I painted the moss of the limb, for instance or the bark of the redwood, I felt like I was creating real moss on real bark. It was a very magical experience.”

Joan paints her illustrations the same size as they appear in the book. Some of the paintings took a few days, she says, while others took weeks. The entire book took about two years to complete.

How did she get her illustrations to look so natural? “I live in a redwood forest,” Joan says. From her work table she looks out on giant trees. “They are second growth - the forest was logged once, but that was about a hundred years ago. Because the trees get a lot of sun, they are huge and look almost like old growth forest.”

To keep her work authentic, Joan took field trips to true ancient forests. Several times a month she headed to Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park – about an hour from her house. “It’s an excellent place to see old growth forest, salmon, elk and marbled murrelets,” she says. “Every time I enter the forest, I stop and just gaze at the trees because I am never fully prepared for their breath-taking presence. At dawn there is an abundance of marbled murrelets flying overhead.”

You can see some of Joan’s sketches and learn more about her work at her website. This post is part of the Nonfiction Monday Round-Up hosted this week by Simply Science, A copy of the book was provided by the publisher.

Dandelion Discoveries

2011-05-08T09:45:00.000-04:00

This time of year my lawn is a patchwork of green, yellow and purple. Dandelions and violets blossom, providing food for the insects and beauty for the eye.

Before you mow your lawn this week, grab your journal and a pencil - and a hand lens if you have one - and check out the dandelions in your yard.

Honeybees are busy in my dandelions. They stop briefly, stash a bit more pollen into their already stuffed (and very orange) pollen baskets and then buzz off to the next flower. There are lots of smaller bees, too: bright green bees that are usually as shiny as newly waxed cars but now are dusted with a coating of pollen; tiny gray bees that circumnavigate the outer ring of flowers before diving into the pollen-rich center. And ants, amber colored with long hind legs that, when they chow down, stick their dark butts into the air.

Beetles and "true bugs" (hemipetera) nibble pollen and, sometimes, petals. Thin-waisted wasps dive headfirst into the blossoms, then fly off to the next flower carrying tiny yellow pollen grains on their thoraxes.

Who do you see in your dandelions?

Leaping Frogs

2011-05-02T14:33:00.000-04:00

A few years ago my children were trying to catch a frog. They'd gotten pretty good at capturing toads, so were astonished at how hard it was to catch a frog. Of course, they were trying to capture a pickerel frog that day... and pickerel frogs can leap small buildings in a single bound.

Frogs are well-designed jumping critters. Some frogs can jump 20 times the length of their bodies, a fact which led my kids to wonder if they were frogs, how far could they leap?

The next obvious question is whether leap distance remains the same over multiple jumps. To determine that we needed frogs and a way to measure. If we had a sidewalk nearby we would have released the frogs and marked each successive jump using chalk. Having the choice of a gravel driveway or lawn, we used bright straws to mark the jumps. You have to move fast if you're following a pickerel frog! Then we could measure the distances and write them down. We never tried it with peepers, but now the woods are noisy with the little tree frogs so this year may be the year to measure peeper leaps.

Spring is ... Noisy!

2011-04-25T16:43:00.000-04:00

In upstate NY you hear spring before you see it. Sure, the red maple buds have brushed the slopes with a blush of color, and the coltsfoot is blooming yellow like a dandelion that forgot its leaves. The forsythia is almost out and the sky is blue, for brief moments.

USGS photo in public domain

But what you really notice about spring coming is the noise. It doesn't creep in on tiny cat feet. No, spring makes a splash with an evening of peeper symphonies.

Peepers are tiny frogs, no longer than your average paper clip and maybe as wide as a kid's thumb. They're tree frogs that, this time of year, migrate to ponds in search of a mate. And that's what all the singing is about - guy peepers seeking gal peepers.

A peeper song sounds just like a chick peep, with a rise at the end. To make that sound the guy - and it is the guys who sing - takes a deep breath, closes his mouth and nostrils, and then pushes air across the vocal cords. Put a bunch of guy peepers in a pond and get 'em singing and it sounds like jingle bells - and the sound can travel far, at least half a mile. If you don't have peepers in your neck of the woods, click here to listen.

Week 2 book winner

2011-04-25T16:42:00.000-04:00

A lot of people entered the contest for "A Place for Fish" - thank you to all who participated. The lucky winner is Jessica, another upstate NY homeschooler who says she loves visiting the Finger Lakes. Congratulations, Jessica. And, as they say, the book's in the mail.

Celebrate Earth Day

2011-04-22T09:22:00.001-04:00

This week I’ve been focusing on Melissa Stewart’s book, A Place for Fish. Now it’s time to take some action – and just in time, too, because it’s Earth Day.

There are plenty of things you can do to make the world better for fish, even if you don’t live close to the ocean or a lake. One of the easiest things to do is stop using plastic bags and plastic water bottles. The problem is that plastic doesn’t decompose – it stays around in the environment for hundreds of years. Some of the plastic garbage has made its way into the floating garbage patch in the Pacific Ocean. You can help fish and other sea life by using fewer plastic bags, bottles and other disposable items.

The pollution we put into the air affects our oceans and lakes. Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides and even carbon dioxide can change the chemistry of water bodies, harming fish and marine creatures. We can reduce the amounts of pollution we put into the air by being more thoughtful about the energy we use. For example: walking or riding a bike instead of driving, turning off lights and TVs when you leave a room, even unplugging your laptop when you’re not using it.

You’ve probably heard that everything runs downhill. The same thing is true for water – rain falling on your street will flow into a stream that will flow into a river that will eventually end up in a lake or ocean. That means that chemicals you spray on your lawn eventually end up in water where fish live. So does oil from leaky cars. Another way you can help fish is to reduce the amount of chemicals you use on your lawn and to make sure that when you see oil leaks on the driveway you let someone know.

This Earth Day what will you do to help make the world a better place for fish?

Book Giveaway Reminder:

You could win your very own copy of A Place for Fish. This particular contest is limited to folks who live in the United States. Entering is simple- just send an email to: sueheaven{at}gmail{dot}com. Contest ends Sunday night April 24.

Interview with Melissa Stewart

2011-04-20T22:29:00.000-04:00

Welcome to Day 10 of Peachtree’s Fins, Wings & Things Blog Tour. Today – an interview with Melissa Stewart, author of A Place for Fish – and a chance to sign up for the book giveaway if you haven’t already (rules at bottom)

You write that "Fish make our world a better place." Was there something in particular that inspired this book?

Melissa: This book is part of a series. It started with APlace for Butterflies . Then came A Place for Birds and APlace for Frogs. Fish seemed like the perfect complement to these other titles. Water covers more than 70 percent of our planet, and it is home to all kinds of fascinating creatures. I thought some of them deserved attention. It’s easy to overlook the dangers of over-fishing or polluting our oceans and waterways. I hope my book will help kids see the importance of caring for the water as well as the land.

How long did it take you to do all the research that went into this book? And did you get to travel to any cool, new places?

Melissa: I researched this book off and on for about three years. Much of the information came from interviews with scientists studying the featured fish. I also drew experiences from past trips to Costa Rica and the Galapagos Islands. I’ll never forget the thrill (or maybe it was terror) of swimming with hammerheads in the Galapagos. I visited the New England Aquarium in Boston while researching this book and saw their great display of seahorses and lots of other fish—both freshwater and salt water species.

Each spread has two kinds of text—a simple main text across the top and more detailed explanations running along the side of one page. Why did you set the book up in this way?

Melissa: When I was writing the first book in this series, A Place for Butterflies, I was substitute teaching at a school in Hudson, MA. When I was covering a first grade classroom, a fourth grade teacher brought her students in so the kids could meet with their Reading Buddies (also called Book Buddies in some schools). The students were using books written at first grade level.

I thought the program was a great idea. Not only were the younger students improving their reading skills, the older students took pride in their role as mentors. But I thought the program might be even more successful if the students used books with sections written at each child’s level. That’s when I decided to create two layers of text in my book. The simpler main text is perfect for younger students. And the more detailed sidebars make it easy to share the book with slightly older students. Then the students can look at the art together and discuss the content. Teachers liked this style of presentation so much that I have even written multi-age level activities for some of the books.

What specific things can we do to help coral reefs?

Melissa: Coral reefs are probably the most critically endangered ocean ecosystems. And that’s bad news because an estimated 90 percent of all ocean life depends on them directly or indirectly. Besides not keeping coral-reef fishes in home aquariums, we should all avoid buying shells and corals collected at coral reefs. If you snorkel or scuba dive at a reef, it’s important not to touch or stand on the living corals. And if you live near coral reefs, don’t pour household cleaners or other chemicals down the drain. Some of these chemicals make corals weak, so they can’t fight diseases. Others make seaweeds and sea grasses grow so quickly that they smother corals.

What did you learn in writing this book?

Melissa: Wow, I learned so much. What I hope kids will take away from the book is that fish—and every other kind of creature on Earth—has an important role to play in their habitats. When species disappear, entire ecosystems suffer in ways that are often hard to predict in advance. That’s why it’s so important to live in a way that shows our respect for the amazing array of living things that share our world.

Book Giveaway

You could win your very own copy of A Place for Fish. This particular contest is limited to folks who live in the United States. All you have to do to enter is send an email to: sueheaven{at}gmail{dot}com.

If you can, leave a comment on this blog about what things you are doing or will do to protect watery places and the fish living in them, and consider becoming a “follower”.

The contest for this book ends Sunday April 25.

Remember to come back tomorrow – Earth Day – and don’t forget to visit Peachtree for the rest of the Blog Tour schedule.

A Place for Fish & book giveaway

2011-04-19T09:09:00.001-04:00

Welcome to week 2 of Peachtree Publisher’s Fins, Wings & Things Blog Tour. During this week's countdown to Earth Day I'm celebrating things with fins. Come back Thursday for an interview with author Melissa Stewart , and Friday for ideas on how you can protect rivers, lakes and oceans. And make sure you enter this week’s Book Giveaway (below).

A Place for Fish

By Melissa Stewart, illustrated by Higgins Bond

32 pages, for ages 6 -10

Peachtree Publishers 2011

There’s a lot to love in this book, starting with the range maps filling the endpapers. So I was engaged before I even reached the title page – but what do you expect when you team up an award-winning writer with a scientific illustrator?

Fish, writes Melissa, make our world a better place. But sometimes people do things that make it hard for them to live and grow. Throughout this book she shows the different roles fish play in their ecological communities, and how children can help make sure there will always be a place for these finny creatures.

Some fish are harmed by the chemicals power plants produce when they burn coal. What can we do? Find other ways to make electricity – or even reduce the amount we use….

And then there are the sidebars and fish profiles. As Stewart highlights the diversity amongst fish found across North America, she focusing on the specific environmental challenges each species faces. The lined seahorse of the Chesapeake Bay was affected by fertilizers washing into the bay. Salmon populations declined when sediment from logging roads eroded into their streams. But in each case, people took action to help make a place so fish could live and grow.

Why do we need fish? They’re part of a food chain that includes bears, birds and even otters. Melissa lists things children can do to help fish, tosses in a few fishy facts (lipstick contains ground-up fish scales) and provides lots of resources.

Book Giveaway

You could win your very own copy of A Place for Fish. This particular contest is limited to folks who live in the United States. Entering is simple- just send an email to: sueheaven{at}gmail{dot}com.

I invite you to leave a comment about what things you are doing, or will do to protect watery places and the fish living in them, and consider becoming a “follower”.

The contest for this book ends Sunday April 25.

Remember to come back Thursday for an interview with Melissa Stewart.

Check out the complete tour schedule at Peachtree.

We have a Winner!

2011-04-18T18:19:00.000-04:00

Thank you to all who entered the book give-away contest for "Planting the Wild Garden". I engaged the services of my in-house statistician (recent college grad).....

And the winner is: Melissa, a homeschooling mom who also happens to be a gardener. Congratulations Melissa!

Stay tuned: a new book giveaway contest starts tomorrow.

Plant a Garden for the Earth

2011-04-15T10:31:00.000-04:00

bumblebee on thistle

Next Friday is Earth Day. Here's one simple thing you can do to make the earth a better place: plant a garden for pollinators. Many kinds of bees and butterflies – even bats – carry pollen from the anthers (male part) in one flower to the stigma (female part) of another, allowing for fertilization and fruit production.

One out of every three bites of food we eat is made possible by a pollinator - without them we wouldn’t have strawberry jam, pizza, or applesauce. Not only that, 80 percent of all flowering plants rely on pollinators for survival.

But some native bees and butterflies are having a hard time surviving. Overuse of pesticides can kill of beneficial insects, including those that pollinate our food crops. Fragmenting the landscape, due to development, makes it hard for butterflies and bees to find important food sources so they can raise their young.

You can give pollinators a helping hand – and keep them doing their job – by planting the kinds of flowers they need. You don’t a lot of space to grow flowers that provide nectar for pollinators. But it is important to plant native species. Here’s a list of some plants that are rich in pollen or nectar – you might even find some of them growing in an abandoned lot or along a roadway in your area:

Aster (Aster)

Black-eyed Susan (Rudbeckia)

Currant (Ribes)

Elder (Sambucus)

Goldenrod (Solidago)

Huckleberry (Vaccinium)

Joe-pye weed (Eupatorium)

Lupine (Lupinus)

Penstemon (Penstemon)

Purple coneflower (Echinacea)

Rabbitbrush (Chrysothamnus)

Rhododendron (Rhododendron)

Sage (Salvia)

Stonecrop (Sedum)

Sunflower (Helianthus)

Wild buckwheat (Eriogonum)
Willow (Salix)

Book Giveaway

Enter to win a copy of Planting the Wild Garden. This particular contest is limited to folks who live in the United States. All you have to do to enter is:

1. Become a follower on Archimedes Notebook if you’re not already (it’s easy – just click on the “follow” button at the right);

2. Leave a comment on this blog about why wild gardens and weedy places are important; and

3. email me at sueheaven{at}gmail{dot}com to let me know you’ve entered so I can email you if you win. I promise I won’t keep any email addresses.

The contest for this book ends Sunday April 17.

Blog Tour: Interview with Kathryn Galbraith

2011-04-13T10:04:00.000-04:00

Welcome to Day 3 of Peachtree Publisher’s “Fins, Wings & Things Blog Tour”. Today – an interview with Kathryn O. Galbraith, author of Planting the Wild Garden and a chance to sign up for the book giveaway if you haven’t already (rules at bottom).

What inspired this book? Do you have a garden or did you get burdocks on your socks?

Kathryn: I have a garden, but the idea for Planting the Wild Garden came along more the "burdocks-on-your-socks" sort of way. I was at a ten-day writing conference held in a huge state park one summer. The area was crisscrossed with paths through meadows and scrubby fields. During my morning walks I watched small brown rabbits nibbling grasses, and flocks of goldfinches perched atop prickly purple thistles. I knew that if I strayed into the fields, I'd risk carrying the fields home with me. Burs caught on socks, jeans and the tails of my shirts. Those images stayed in my mind for a long time before I discovered a way to knit them all together.

I love the female as farmer! What inspired that?

Kathryn: I consider myself very lucky because I have four wonderful brothers. Being the only girl, I always wanted to do what they did – and more. In short, I was born a happy feminist. In my writing, I try to always be aware of how easy it is to fall into old stereotypes. In the first draft, the story began with a grandmother and her grandson, but in later drafts, I changed it to "A farmer and her boy" because of the sound and simplicity of the words.

How did you do the research for this book?

Kathryn: I did lots of research - some by foot and some by books. Both were important to me. When I was finished, I had a fat file of drawings, photographs and notes. I didn't use all of what I learned, but having more than enough information allowed me to select out the most interesting facts and images.

Did you watch scotch broom pods shatter and spit out their seeds?

Kathryn: It seems as if Scotch broom is everywhere in Washington state - in fields, along the highways, even on the hillside behind my house. On hot summer days in August you can hear the pods pop open from quite a ways away. To actually see the seed fly, though, you need to be standing quite close.

Can you talk about how people aid seed dispersal?

Kathryn: Early in our country’s history, seeds hitchhiked across the ocean in bushels and barrels of feed for the cows and goats, and were caught up in clothing and equipment. Families brought favorite seeds to bring “a bit of home” with them and also brought seeds of healing plants. In today’s world, invasive species have traveled unnoticed in the cargo holds of planes and ships, on imported animals and plants, and even on patches of mud from the wheels of cars.

Book Giveaway

Enter to win a copy of Planting the Wild Garden. This particular contest is limited to folks who live in the United States. All you have to do to enter is:

1. Become a follower on Archimedes Notebook if you’re not already (it’s easy – just click on the “follow” button at the bottom of the right column);

2. Leave a comment on this blog about why wild gardens and weedy places are important; and

3. email me at sueheaven{at}gmail{dot}com to let me know you’ve entered so I can email you if you win. I promise I won’t keep any email addresses.

The contest for this book ends Sunday April 17.

Remember to come back Friday for an Earth Day activity.

There are more stops (and book giveaways) on today's tour - check out the complete schedule at Peachtree

Nonfiction Monday & a Blog Tour

2011-04-10T22:03:00.001-04:00

Welcome to Day 1 of Peachtree Publisher’s “Fins, Wings & Things Blog Tour”. I’m starting the week off with a review of Planting the Wild Garden. Come back Wednesday for an interview with author Kathryn Galbraith, and Friday for ideas on how you can make the world a better place with gardens. And make sure you enter the Book Giveaway (rules below).

Planting the Wild Garden

By Kathryn O. Galbraith, illustrated by Wendy Anderson Halperin

32 pages, for ages 4 – 8

Peachtree Publishers 2011

I love books that engage me from the moment I open the cover, so I got lost in Wendy Halperin’s excellent illustrations of seeds covering the end papers. And I spent a long time on the first spread, admiring the drawings of pumpkins, peas and cabbages from germinating seed to flower to fruit.

I also love the way Kathryn Galbraith begins the story: “The farmer and her boy plant their garden.” Maybe it’s because gardening was one thing I shared with my boys. Or maybe it’s because many of the farmers I know are women.

The farmer and her boy plant seeds, but over in the meadow other seeds are planted – and not by farmer’s hands. Galbraith’s lyrical language and Halperin’s detailed drawings take us on a whirlwind tour of seed dispersal. Seeds fly on the wind and on birds; they shatter from pods – snap, snap, like popcorn from a pan. Some seeds are carried away by rain; others hitch rides on furry tails or wooly socks. And even others are buried and forgotten. And all of them help make the roadsides and vacant lots and meadows beautiful.

Take some time this week to look at the plants growing in wild gardens around your neighborhood. And check out some seed activities at Growing With Science.

Book Giveaway

Enter to win a copy of Planting the Wild Garden. This particular contest is limited to folks who live in the United States. All you have to do to enter is:

1. Become a follower on Archimedes Notebook if you’re not already (it’s easy – just click on the “follow” button at the bottom of the right column);

2. Leave a comment on this blog about why wild gardens and weedy places are important; and

3. email me at sueheaven{at}gmail{dot}com to let me know you’ve entered so I can email you if you win. I promise I won’t keep any email addresses.

The contest for this book ends Sunday April 17.

Remember to come back Wednesday when I’ll be hosting an interview with Kathryn Galbraith.

And don't forget to check out the other blog tour stops today, starting with Rebecca’s post at A Word’s Worth. Check out the complete tour schedule at Peachtree.

This post is part of the Nonfiction Monday Round-Up hosted this week by Apple With Many Seeds

Review copy provided by the publisher.

How to Measure a Raindrop

2011-04-03T11:49:00.000-04:00

There’s always water vapor in our air. Sometimes it collects in clouds and then, when it gets heavy enough, falls to earth as rain.

Most people think of raindrops as tear-shaped. But a French scientist, who filmed falling droplets, found that air resistance causes raindrops to change shape as they fall. He documented large, round drops that flattened as they fell, growing wider and then filling with air like a jellyfish or a parachute . When the parachute inflated, the drop burst apart into smaller droplets. All of this activity happened fast, too - within 6/100 of a second.

So how big are these raindrops when they finally reach us? Meteorologists – scientists who measure such things – say that raindrops range anywhere from 1/100 of an inch to 1/4 inch in diameter.

You can measure your own raindrops. What you need:

shoebox lid
ruler
flour
bowl
fine mesh sieve

Fill the shoebox lid with flour and use a ruler to smooth the top so it is level.

During a gentle shower, hold the shoebox lid out in the rain until about 15-25 raindrops have fallen into the flour. Bring the lid inside to see what you’ve found. Flour absorbs water, and since the flour is a powder it will hold the shape of the raindrop together.

Now set the sieve over the bowl. Carefully pour the flour from the lid into the sieve, shaking it gently. This will sift flour into the bowl and leave the raindrop lumps behind.

Gently pour your flour-preserved droplets onto a sheet of paper and measure them.

You can find more rainy day activities at weather wiz kids.

A Backyard Field Trip

2011-03-26T20:44:00.001-04:00

We're caught on the cusp of a changing season. The last drops of maple sap are being collected and the maple moths are getting bolder.

This week is the perfect time for a backyard field trip. Head outside to see what sort of critters you see on the snow, or under the snow, or around the snow. Check for bird tracks in the mud, greening grass and crocuses, and stuff the snowplows left behind.

This week will be a good one for watching stars - the quarter moon is waning and by next Sunday it should be completely dark. The geese have been migrating north, but will there be as many flying on a moonless night?

Follow the Season - Spring

2011-03-20T13:07:00.000-04:00

Despite this evening’s forecast – 20 degrees and snow – today really is the first day of spring. The vernal equinox. One of two magical days where the length of day is balanced by the length of night. From here on out the days get longer.

The last few days the air has smelled like spring – well, that and hot maple syrup. Chickadees have added upbeat songs to their repertoire; sparrows and juncos cluster on the lawn picking millet out of the dead grass. Spears of daffodil leaves have pushed up from the lawn and the soil smells fresh, sweet.

It’s noisy, too. In addition to the cooing of mourning doves there’s the sound of water running down hill, the gentle hum of honeybees stretching their wings, the schlook of mud beneath my sneakers.

Now is the time to grab a notebook and document the changing season. Maybe you want to map where the sun rises each morning, or keep a lookout for the first bumblebees. Or maybe you want to document when the first flowers bud and bloom.

There’s a whole field of study that documents the timing of biological events in plants and animals such as flowering, leafing, hibernation, reproduction, and migration. It’s called “phenology”, and scientists involved in this field are interested in the timing of such biological events in relation to changes in season and climate.

You can contribute to this research by getting involved in Project Budburst.

Nonfiction Monday: Big Night for Salamanders

2011-03-13T18:10:00.000-04:00

Big Night for Salamanders

by Sarah Marwil Lamstein, illustrated by Carol Benioff

40 pages, for ages 7 – 9

Boyds Mills Press 2010

Every spring Spotted Salamanders migrate from their winter homes in the forested hills to their breeding ponds, where they mate and lay their eggs. It’s a long and dangerous journey, especially when the tiny amphibians – obscured in the rainy dark of night – must cross roads. Fortunately, children (and adults) show up on migration night, slowing down traffic and carrying salamanders across the roads.

Sarah Lamstein captures the excitement of this annual migration well in Big Night for Salamanders. Evan, racing home from the school bus, asks his parents: Is this the Big Night? He covers his flashlight with pink plastic so as not to hurt the salamanders’ eyes, and heads out to warn motorists to slow down.

A few weeks ago I asked Lamstein what inspired her to write the book – aside from her own experiences helping tiny amphibians across the road. “It’s the magic of the event,” she said – not just the yearly phenomenon of salamanders migrating to the pond en masse, but the magic of vernal pools. They’re present in the spring, but by the end of summer the seasonal pools are gone. Dried up. Disappeared.

“Then there is the magic of the Spotted Salamanders,” Lamstein said. “Their loveliness and their vulnerability.” The final bit of magic, she says, is in the children who help the salamanders cross a road on Big Night.

Big Night alternates between two points of view. Part of the story is told through Evan’s voice, the child who can’t wait to put on his boots and head out to help his salamandery friends. The other half narrates an up-close-and-personal amphibious viewpoint about emerging from winter sleep and feeling the pull to head pondward.

“The most remarkable thing I learned,” says Lamstein, “is that they find their way to the vernal pool through remembered scents.” When the baby salamanders complete development and leave their pool for the upland forest, they remember the scents of the soil, plants and rocks along the way. This sensory map guides them back to the pool each year. “It’s remarkable!” says Lamstein.

Lamstein’s deep appreciation for the spotted salamanders and her own involvement with Big Night give her story authenticity. No wonder Smithsonian listed Big Night for Salamanders in their 2010 Notable Books for Children.

This post is part of the Nonfiction Monday Round-Up hosted this week by Chapter Book of the Day; book provided from the local library.

Map the Shifting Season

2011-03-06T15:31:00.000-05:00

March is an uncertain month. This morning it was raining – now there’s so much snow falling that the weatherman says we’ll get close to a foot on the ground. Sure the groundhog promised spring soon, but sometimes we need proof that the season is changing.

Here’s a few ideas for mapping the change in the seasons:

Keep a journal. You can write or draw your what you see outside: how many birds show up at the feeder, how long it takes to shovel the driveway, how the color of the sky changes, how deep the snow is and how fast it’s melting.

Keep a photo-journal of pictures showing one particular area over the next few weeks.

If you like to draw treasure maps you might try mapping the change of seasons. For example, where does the snow melt fastest in your neighborhood? Where are the sunny spots, the shady spots, and the places where the squirrels hang out on a snowy day? When spring comes, where does X mark the spot?

What other ways can you collect information about the shifting season?

Do Dark Colors Make Snow Melt Faster?

2011-02-27T18:44:00.000-05:00

When snow and ice combine to make my steep driveway impossible to drive up, I wait for a sunny day and sprinkle ashes on top of the snow. I’m convinced the dark color of the ashes helps make the snow melt faster (not to mention, give me traction when I try to drive up).

Does color influence the rate of snow melting? You can test this by cutting squares of different colors of felt or construction paper and spreading them over the top of the snow on the next sunny day. After a couple hours compare how deep each color has sunk below the surface.

Do light colors melt the snow as fast as dark colors?

How fast do leaves and twigs and clusters of pine needles melt into the snow?

Snow Talk

2011-02-20T11:29:00.000-05:00

This morning thousands of fat, fluffy snowflakes hurtled earthward, adding to the three or four inches that accumulated yesterday. The snow was cold, powdery, too dry for snowballs. By lunchtime the sun broke through and the temperature climbed, leaving a melty top layer that will freeze into a thick icy crust tonight.

The quality of snow falling and layering into icy strata that, if this weather keeps up, may not melt till the Ides of March changes from day to day. Sometimes from hour to hour. I’m not sure if our language has enough words to describe these changes. But the people living near the North Pole do. According to folks who study such things, the People of the North have more than a hundred words for snow. Here’s a few:

qanuk = snowflake

qanik = falling snow

pirtuk = blizzard or snowstorm

cellallir = snowing heavily

pirrelvag = blizzarding heavily

kaneq = frost

kanevvluk = fine snow particles

nevluk = clinging snow particles

qali = snow that collects on trees

qanikcaq = snow on the ground

natquik = drifting snow

murvaneq = soft deep snow

qengaruk = snowbank

qetrar = crust on snow

upsik = wind-beaten snow

kiaoglaqq = wind-eroded snow

siqoqtoak = sun-crusted snow

tsiko = ice

kuhagaq = icicle

nutaryuk = freshly fallen snow on the ground

qunisqinea = fresh fallen snow floating on water

We may not have a hundred, but here are some of the words the English language has collected to describe the ice and snow of winter: blizzard, blowing snow, corn snow, crusty, drifting, dry, dusting, flurries, frost, glazed, graupel, hail, hard packed, heavy, hoar, ice, meltwater crust, powder, rime, slush, sleet, snowflake, snow squall, snirt, sugar snow, white-out and wind crust.

Do you know more snow words that should be added to the list?

If there is no word to describe the snow in your part of the world, make some up.

Getting Around on the Snow

2011-02-13T10:06:00.001-05:00

It just keeps on snowing – and the snow keeps getting deeper and deeper. When there’s a lot of snow on the ground, many animals have a hard time getting around. But not the lynx and snowshoe hare – their feet are large and wide compared to the rest of their body. And covered with extra hair. Those big, hairy feet allow them to float on top of the snow instead of sinking.

If you try walking on top of fresh, deep snow, you’ll sink up to your knees – or deeper! But if you lie down and make snow angels you don’t, because your body weight is spread over a larger area.

The trick to walking on top of snow is to spread your weight out. Like lynx and snowshoe hares, you need bigger feet. You can make your feet larger by strapping on a pair of snowshoes.

If you don’t have snowshoes, cardboard boxes (without topses) will do. Just grab a pizza box or two and some heavy-duty scissors. Put your boot on a piece of cardboard and draw a line around it – but five inches (about a hand-span) wider than the boot’s edge. Mark two dots on each side of the boot – that’s where you’ll poke holes for your shoestring “snowshoe bindings”.

Shape your snowshoe outline into an oval, and cut it out. Poke the holes where you marked, and use shoelaces or twine to tie them on your feet. Then grab a ruler and head outside.

First, take a few steps in the snow without your snowshoes. How deep do you sink?

Now tie on your snow-walking pizza shoes and take some steps. What’s it like to have big feet? Do you walk differently? More important – how far do you sink into the snow?

Nonfiction Monday: Winter Trees

2011-02-06T19:30:00.000-05:00

Winter Trees

By Carole Gerber, illustrated by Leslie Evans

32 pages, for ages 4-8

Charlesbridge 2008

Winter is spare, stark, gray and dark … a perfect season to hibernate in the library. Which is where I found Carole Gerber’s book, Winter Trees. Winter, Gerber explains, is the best time to look at trees because you can see their “skeletons” – the egg shape of maple, the oval of beech, the sloping sides of evergreen pyramids.

Winter Trees takes the reader on an adventure of exploration with a boy and his dog. Together they crunch through fresh, frozen snow. Together they compare the smooth peeling trunk of the birch tree to the yellow poplar’s furrowed bark, the soft ferny hemlock twigs to the sharp spruce needles.

Gerber, who volunteers at a nature preserve, wrote her first tree book about fall leaves. It was after slogging through snow and tapping a maple to make syrup, she said, that she was inspired to write a second book about trees. She wanted to focus on a different season. The challenge, Gerber says, is finding another group of beautiful trees that she can fit together in a single long verse.

Gerber says that she does a lot of research. Then she needs to find a way to translate what she learns into language that will appeal to young children and, at the same time, teach them about the trees in their back yards and city parks. She learns new things, too – “The most interesting is that evergreen needles are actually thin, pointed leaves!”

The result of all her work is an award-winning picture book – Winter Trees was named “Outstanding Science Trade Books for Students K-12” by NSTA. The book is more than a field guide – it encourages children to interact with the trees growing beyond their front door. Even if it is something as simple as collecting twigs and pine cones and crunchy dried leaves to decorate a snowman.

This post is part of the Nonfiction Monday Round-Up hosted this week by Wild About Nature. I picked up a copy of the book at my local library.

How Much does a Snowflake Weigh?

2011-01-30T15:07:00.001-05:00

from SnowCrystals.com

correction added Feb. 15, 2011*
One snowflake doesn’t weigh very much – but after awhile all those feathery flakes add up. Ten inches of snow covering an acre of land weighs about 226,000 pound. That’s more snow than you’ll shovel … but the next time a thick layer of white stuff piles up, think about the weight of all the snow you have to clear off the sidewalk.

If there’s a layer ten inches deep, and you clear a sidewalk that’s five feet wide and 50 feet long, you might be lifting and tossing as much as 1300 pounds of snow. Shovel your neighbor’s walk and you’ve lifted a ton or more. After a work-out like that, who needs weights?

Someone who measures such things determined that an individual snowflake weighs 0.02* grams. At that weight it would take 50 flakes to make a gram. For comparison, a Hershey’s kiss weighs 4.7 grams – equal to about 235 snowflakes. There are about 95 kisses in a pound. Using the kiss-to-snow crystal calculator that comes to 22,325 snowflakes/pound.
*this would be the heaviest end of the spectrum. Most are much lighter, weighing from 0.001 to 0.003 grams.

In reality, it’s hard to measure the weight of a snowflake. For one thing, each snowfall is different. Some snow is light and fluffy, and some is heavy and wet. That’s due to the water content in the snow, which is related to the temperature high in the clouds where the flakes began forming, and the temperature of the air they fall through.

The only way to really measure the weight of snow is to let it melt, and then weigh the water. Find a container you can use as your snow-measuring scoop – we use 2-cup deli containers (and the lids). Next time snowflakes fall, go outside and collect a bunch of the fresh stuff. Put a lid on the top (so it doesn’t evaporate) and let it melt. Then weigh it.

You can keep track of the type of snowfall and how heavy it is through the rest of the season. Does spring snow weigh more than winter snow?

Another thing you can investigate is whether old snow weighs more than fresh snow. Or snow that’s been compressed under a snowbank.

There's No Business Like Snow Business...

2011-01-22T19:04:00.001-05:00

not an actual snowflake...

The northeast has had its share of snow this winter. Where does all this white stuff come from?

A snowflake starts as water vapor that condenses on a dust particle. At cloud temperatures of 23 degrees F, the water vapor begins to form ice crystals. As long as the cloud remains supersaturated with water vapor, the crystals grow. When they get too big and heavy, gravity takes over and the crystals fall toward earth.

Air temperature determines the basic shape of the snowflake, and th4e degree of saturation in the clouds determines how fast the crystal grows. Snow crystals tend to grow larger and faster when the air temperature is higher and there is a lot of water vapor. Lower air temperatures and less water vapor means smaller snowflakes.

Though each snowflake is unique they generally reflect six-sided symmetry. Here are some of the typical types of snowflakes:

Star-like crystals that have six arms that extend from the center;
Plates that are flat six-sided crystals with no obvious projections;
Columns that may be hollow or solid, with flat or pointed ends;
Capped columns with flat plates on each end;
Needles - skinny columns that end in points;
Spatial dendrites that have fern-like branches; and
Irregular crystals that live up to their name.

Go outside next time it snows and take a good look at the flakes that are falling down. And if you need an expert flake guide, check out Ken Libbrecht’s Field Guide to Snowflakes (2006, Voyageur Press) or check out his website, Snow Crystals. He’s got lots of flake photos online, and even some advice on making snowflake fossils.

Freeze a Bubble

2011-01-15T14:33:00.000-05:00

It's been so cold these past few days that the marker in the back-porch thermometer has frozen permanently somewhere south of 23 degrees F. That translates to -5 degrees C which, when you read it, looks way colder than it really is.

But still, too cold for the icicles to melt. Or the snow, which keeps piling up.

On the positive side, these temperatures are perfect for freezing soap bubbles. If you've got some bubble mix left over from the summer, go outside on any day when it's below 32 degrees F (0 C) and try this: blow a bubble and then catch it on the bubble wand. Wait a few moments while it freezes - it should turn into a crystal ball before it shatters.

If you want to watch icy crystals form, dip a large loop in the bubble solution - but don't blow a bubble. Instead, watch the crystals grow. They should form a lattice structure.

Nonfiction Monday: Under the Snow

2011-01-10T09:35:00.000-05:00

Under the Snow

By Melissa Stewart, illustrated by Constance R Bergum

32 pages, for ages 4-8

Peachtree Publishers 2009

Winter seems like a quiet time. Except for the birds at the feeder – and the squirrels crouched below, waiting for the cascade of rejected millet as the chickadees pick through for sunflower seeds – there’s little activity outside.

But there’s a lot going on under the snow, and Melissa Stewart takes us on a wintry field trip in her lovely book, Under the Snow. This book offers a lyrical tour of habitats and the animals that live there in the winter. You’ll meet ladybugs snuggled into a crevice in a stone wall and a meadow vole that nibbles bark off a tree trunk for mid-winter snacks. In my garden the voles simply tunnel under the mulch and snack on the rutabagas I forgot to harvest…

Stewart, along with Bergum’s wonderful watercolors, introduce us to the secret world of insects sleeping beneath the snow, the wood frog beneath leaves, a woodchuck snug in his burrow. They also show us the slow-moving bluegills and carp in the pond, under the ice.

My favorite spread is red-spotted newts dodging and darting just below the ice. Now I want to go down to the neighbor’s pond and clear off the ice to see whether the newts are swimming there. As soon as it stops snowing, of course.

“Many authors have written books about hibernation,” Stewart writes on her website. “But I wanted children to know that many animals stay active all winter long – even under the snow.” You can read more about how she wrote the book at her blog.

This post is part of the Nonfiction Monday Round-Up hosted this week by Tales from the Rushmore Kid.

Slippy Slidy Ice

2011-01-02T20:06:00.000-05:00

Ice is slippery because of the way the ice crystals on the surface behave. Tiny ice particles (molecules) on the surface move back and forth very fast. This constant vibration makes the top layer of ice crystals act like a thin liquid, reducing friction between an object and the ice. Great for hockey pucks. Not so good for people walking on a sidewalk.

The colder it gets, the stickier ice gets. That means there’s more friction between an object and the surface of the ice. But the highway departments in our area don’t wait for the temperature to drop. Snowplows head out at all hours of the night spreading a mixture of sand and salt to increase friction – and help melt the ice on roads.

Up on our hill we spread wood ashes on the road. Not only do they give traction, but if it’s a sunny day the areas covered by the dark ashes melt faster than the ice without ashes. We sprinkle sand or kitty litter on the steps to our house.

What can you use to increase the friction – lower the slipperiness – of ice on your driveway?

First you need an ice patch to experiment with. Then try sprinkling different things across the surface to help your feet get a better grip. If you have some old beets from the garden, try beet juice – some communities are using beet juice instead of salt to help melt ice.

You also need a way to test slipperiness. Find something that slides across ice well, such as a hockey puck or flat-bottomed microwave container filled with dry beans. Now figure out how you can launch it across a patch of ice so that each test is the same. You might create a short ramp and let your puck slide down the ramp and onto the ice. Or you might devise a slingshot that launches the puck across the ice (make sure you pull it back to the same launch line each time). You also need a way to mark where the puck stops.

Test your experimental design a few times with nothing on the ice, and then sprinkle your “slip-stopper” on the ice and see how far your puck slides.