Welcome to Pollinator Week!

I’m celebrating pollinators all week with books and activities. Pollinators come in all shapes and sizes, from teensy bees to big flappy bats. One thing a lot of them have in common is wings, so I’m starting the week off with…

Wonder Wings: Guess Who’s Flying 

by Rebecca E. Hirsch; illus. by Sally Soweol Han 

40 pages; ages 4-8

‎Abrams Books for Young Readers, 2025   

Wings can soar and wings can skim…

Rhyming clues ask readers to guess whose wings these are. For example: wings that buzz and pollinate – and fly back to a hollow tree. Or what about wings that make a thrumming sound, that beat so fast all you can see is a blur? What about colorful wings that drift and float? Or wings that swoop through twilight sky?

Pollinator Week Activity: Make some wearable wings using recycled cardboard and markers, colored paper, and yarn or twine to attach them to your back. This video from the Smithsonian shows one way you can do it.

Cats and Bats are where it's at

themes: animals, nonfiction

The Secret Life of the Little Brown Bat
by Laurence Pringle; illus. by Kate Garchinsky
32 pages; ages 6-9
Boyds Mills Press, 2018

The sun has set. A July sky dims, then grows darker.

For most of us, that means time to sleep. But for Otis and his family it is time to WAKE UP! There's so much to do before they fly into the night. The book takes us into the family life of little brown bats, how parents know their pups, and first flight.

What I like about this book: It's such a personal look into the lives of little brown bats. I love the nearly step-by-step instructions Laurence Pringle gives us on how to hunt using echolocation - not that I'll ever use it (unless I'm hunting moths maybe). If the bat's name, Otis, seems familiar that's because it comes from the genus name Myotis, which means mouse-eared. The illustrations are perfect - with a soft feel that you almost want to snuggle up to.

Just Like Us! Cats
by Bridget Heos; illus. by David Clark
32 pages; ages 4-7
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019

Cats have retractable claws, razor-sharp teeth, and tails for balancing. Humans don't. But in some ways, cats and people are alike.

For example, cats sometimes fight other cats. Other times, cats act in diplomatic ways to reduce the chance of fighting. Cat moms don't just take care of their kittens, they homeschool them. First lesson: what to eat and how to catch it. Some cats are swimmers. Others, like the lynx, play in the snow.

What I like about this book: It's fun. The mix of photos and cartoonish elements make it a fun read, because there's always one more thing to look for. Cats have been living with humans for nearly 10,000 years, so it's time we understood them.

Beyond the books:

Learn more about little brown bats over at BioKIDS.

Could you hunt using sound waves? Gather some friends and play a game of Echo! Location! Choose one person to be the bat, and blindfold them. Everyone else stands in a circle around the bat. Have one person be the moth. When the Bat calls out "echo", the moth replies "location". As the bat continues to say echo, it moves toward the location of the prey. More bat science activities here.

Do some cat science. Test your cat, or a friend's cat, to see if it is right- or left-pawed. Here's how.

Today we're joining other book bloggers over at STEM Friday, where you can discover other cool STEM books. And we're joining Perfect Picture Book Friday, an event where bloggers share great picture books at Susanna Leonard Hill's website . Review copies provided by the publishers.

Scuba Diving Spiders and Hugs

There are so many cool animals living on our planet, and so many ways to introduce their stories to children. Here are a couple released last fall that I really enjoyed.
theme: animals, nonfiction

The Secret of the Scuba Diving Spider ... and more!
by Ana Maria Rodriguez
48 pages; ages 8 - 11
Enslow, 2017

Roger Seymour and Stefan Hetz, animal biologists, are scouting Germany's northern countryside for the one-of-a-kind diving bell spider, the only spider that lives underwater.

It's not an easy job: the spiders are only as long as one to three grains of rice; they're hard to find in the water; and they are becoming rare because of habitat loss and pollution.  But the scientists find their spiders and we learn how the spiders build their diving bells.

What I like about this book: It's got more than diving bell spiders. There are whistling caterpillars - they whistle warning calls to their buddies- as well as bats that jam signals from other bats, and zombie ladybugs. Yes! Zombie Ladybugs! And cockroaches because if you're talking extreme bugs, you can't leave the roaches out.

Informative, fun, filled with unexpected surprises about weird creatures - this book's all that plus a hands-on activity at the end. And it's filled with photos that will engage kids and draw them into the strange lives of these critters.

How Many Hugs?
by Heather Swain; illus. by Steven Henry
32 pages; ages 4-8
Feiwel & Friends, 2017

Since snakes have no arms, nor any feet, 
they can slither about very discreet.
But this lack of appendages surely would make
an awkward affair if a hug from a snake.

From critters with no legs to those with hundreds, Heather Swain counts hugs. Using rhyme, she answers questions every kid has asked: how many legs does a millipede have?

What I like about this book: It's fun. It's imaginative. And it's filled with math, especially division. For example, if you have two arms how many hugs can you give at one time? Just one - which is half of two.  As the number of  legs/arms increases, the math gets a bit harder. But the concept remains the same: H = L/2 (the number of hugs equals the number of legs divided by two). So.... that millipede with 750 legs? I'll leave the math to you.

The other thing I like - there's back matter. A spread of facts about each animal and its leggy relatives.

Beyond the Book:

Find out more about Diving Bell spiders. Check out this video. Then head over to Ana Maria Rodriguez's website where you can find a teacher's guide for the book. There are plenty more activities there plus a crossword puzzle.

How many hugs can you find in your neighborhood? Check out the animal wildlife living in and around you. Jot down each animal you see and how many legs it has. Then calculate how many hugs it could potentially give at one time.

Invent a way you could live under water. How would you collect and store air to breathe? 

Today we're joining the STEM Friday roundup - and we're also joining others over at Perfect Picture Book Friday, an event in which bloggers share great picture books at Susanna Leonard Hill's site. She keeps an ever-growing list of Perfect Picture Books. Review copies from the publishers.

Books about doing Citizen Science

Arbordale, 2017; ages 4-9

Arbordale Publishing has two new books out that feature citizen science. That's when kids and their families help scientists do research. It might be tagging butterflies, or counting birds, bats, or even crabs. 

theme: nonfiction, nature, animals

Moonlight Crab Count opens with a list:
Full moon. Check.
High tide. Check.
Flashlight. Check.
Clipboard. Check....

Leena is getting ready to do science. She and her mom, and Bobie, the dog, head out to a beach where they will count horseshoe crabs. The crabs are ancient creatures, with hard, spiny shells and pointy tails. They are an essential part of the ocean ecosystem, and medical companies use their blood to test medicines. But experts worry that horseshoe crabs are disappearing, so every summer volunteers help count the crabs.

Arbordale, 2017; ages 4-9

 Bat Count begins with sunset:
The sun is dropping behind the ridge and the red-winged blackbirds have quit their squalling, so I know it's almost time.

Jojo remembers a time when there used to be more bats living in their barn. But then newspapers told how bats were dying of white-nose syndrome, and so Jojo and her mom began doing bat counts. At the beginning of summer, they saw only one bat. Tonight, Jojo hopes to see more. She is rooting for the bats to return to the night sky.

What I like about the books - They portray kids and their families engaged in citizen science: collecting data that will help researchers understand more about crabs and bats. Both books contain back matter that adds to the understanding of both the animals, and the research being done.

Beyond the books:

Find out more about Horseshoe crabs. This blogpost tells more about the crab count behind the book, and has links to citizen science crab counts. Here are some more links for horseshoe crab counts in Delaware Bay and New York.

Learn more about Bats at Anna Forrester's website.


Become a citizen scientist. You don't have to tag crabs or count bats - there are tons of projects to be involved in. Check out the links over to the right under "Get Involved in Real Science", or find a project on the Scientific American citizen science page or Scistarter. 

Today is Perfect Picture Book Friday, an event in which bloggers share great picture books at Susanna Leonard Hill's site. She keeps an ever-growing list of Perfect Picture Books. Review copies from the publisher.

The Case of the Vanishing Bats

The Case of the Vanishing Brown Bats

By Sandra Markle

48 pages; ages 9-12

Millbrook Press, 2014

If you're looking for a perfect Halloween mystery, this book's for you. You see, little brown bats were once among the most common kinds of bats in North America. But by 2013, their population had dropped so low that scientists wondered whether they should be listed as endangered species. 

[perfect spot for spooky musical interlude]

This story begins in 2007, when a team of scientists from the NY State Dept. of Environmental Conservation goes to a cave near Albany. Their job: to count hibernating bats. What they found were lots of dead bats, some with fuzzy white noses. The following year they found even more dead bats.

What was killing the bats? Was it climate change? Pesticides? A virus?

In her book, Sandra Markle follows a team of scientists working on the bat-killer mystery. She follows them into caves and into their labs. The scientists determine that the killer is a fungus – but they still have more questions: what will happen to the populations of other animals that depend on the bats? Some animals rely on bats for their suppers, and farmers rely in bats to control crop-munching insects in the ecosystem.

Markle provides amazing bat facts and lists ways people can help their local bats. She’s also got a long list of books and other resources for folks who want to explore bats more deeply.

Today is Halloween. It's also STEM Friday! Head over to the STEM Friday blog to see what other people are reviewing. On Monday we'll join the roundup over at the Nonfiction Monday blog where you'll find even more book reviews. Review copy provided by publisher