So, Your Kid Wants to be a Scientist or Engineer… Now What? by Jennifer Swanson

 As an award-winning author of STEM books for kids, I get asked this all the time. Especially by parents or teachers who might not be that interested in STEM themselves. They want to encourage this interest but have no idea where to start.

Step #1: Allow them to follow their curiosity!

That’s how it started for me. I’ve loved science my whole life. Here’s me, as a young child. While it looks like I was just playing with a ball in a pool, I was probably doing my very first experiment. I might have been thinking, “why does this ball float?” and “what would happen if I push this ball under the water? Will it come up again?” I mean, I was probably two years old in this picture, so maybe I didn’t have all of these questions. But they were brewing there, right under the surface, waiting to be asked. And thankfully, my parents encouraged my curiosity. 

Step #2: Get them to the library! 

Kids that have an interest in science, technology, engineering, and math can find tons of resources at the library. I encourage you to let them roam the aisles of the nonfiction books. Encourage them to grab books about whatever topic interests them— sea turtles, cars, rockets, robots, elephants, quantum physics, or even the history of the world. Whatever captures their attention will fuel their imagination for the future. 

Step #3: Listen and Learn!

The best way to learn about a job is to talk to someone who is doing it or has done it. Remember as a kid when you visited the firehouse to learn about being a fireman, or went to the local grocery store to learn about how food is transported and sold. Both of those experiences taught you about those jobs because you got to see— and hear— about it firsthand. 

So, take your kids to nature centers or zoos and introduce them to the biologists. Go to a space museum and meet an astronaut. Or, if you don’t know where to go, take a listen to some podcasts, like my Solve It! For Kids podcast, where you can hear from scientists, engineers, and experts. Let kids dream that about the job they want to have one day. 

Step #4 : Get Involved! 

Get outside and explore the world! Sign up for a beach clean-up. Collect trash at a park. Go on a walk around a lake to notice the wildlife. Hike a nature trail. Ride bikes along the beach. All of these activities will introduce kids to the science that is all around them every day.

Curiosity. Exploration. Inspiration. That’s what it’s all about. If kids (of all ages), just investigate what intrigues them and strive to learn more, who knows where it will take them! 

Jennifer Swanson is the award-winning author of over 45 nonfiction books for children. Using her background in science and history that she received from the U.S. Naval Academy, and her M.S. in Education, Jennifer excels at taking complex facts and making them accessible, compelling, and humorous for young readers.  Jennifer's passion for science resonates in in all her books but especially, Astronaut-Aquanaut: How Space Science and Sea Science Interact and BEASTLY BIONICS which both received Florida Book Awards and  NSTA BEST STEM book awards.  Her Save the Crash-test Dummies book received an NSTA BEST STEM Award and a Parent’s Choice GOLD Award.  Jennifer has been a featured speaker at the Tucson Book Festival, National NSTA conferences, the Highlights Foundation, the World Science Festival the Atlanta Science Festival and the Library of Congress’ National Book Festival in 2019. Her newest book, Footprints Across the Planet comes out next month. You can find Jennifer through her website.

There is Fungus Among Us

 Fungi are everywhere, but sometimes you don’t see them because they are small. Or they don’t look like a typical mushroom. The trick with finding fungi – well, with finding anything, really – is to learn enough about them so you know what to look for. And once you know what to look for, you begin finding fungi all around:

• Growing in the mulch beneath the tomatoes
• Popping up in the lawn after a week of rain
• In the tops of downed branches
• Growing on old logs
• Decomposing a stump in the yard
• In the breadbox and pushed to the back of the fridge

Sue: I remember the first time I saw a coral fungus. It looks just as the name suggests: like a bit of coral pushing up from the leaves. Used to finding turkey tails and mushrooms, I had no idea it was a fungus. Now I see it everywhere in the wooded area behind our garden.

 

Alisha checking out fungi at Highlights

Alisha: One Saturday morning I drove to Austin to meet up with a friend that I’ve hardly seen in the last two years. I parked under a tree and hustled inside for a visit. When I returned to my car, I noticed beautiful polypore mushrooms on the tree. How did I miss them when I arrived? Probably in too much of a hurry. While researching and writing Funky Fungi, I realized there were many specimens of fungi that were there all along, but I never noticed.  

Sue: When we started talking about Funky Fungi, I got a field guide (confession: I had an entire shelf of field guides but not one about mushrooms!) so I could begin to recognize the fungi growing around me. Then I discovered an amazing reference in our library system, The Book of Fungi: A Life-Size Guide to Six Hundred Species from around the World by Peter Roberts and Shelley Evans. In addition to having wonderful photos, there’s a distribution map for each fungus. It clocks in at 656 pages and weighs as much as a hefty bag of sugar (5#). I don’t own a copy, and I hate to even speculate what the delivery guy mutters every time I request it through the library system.

Sue finds mushrooms in the yard

But here’s the thing. Paging through these books, looking at the photos, reading the descriptions … it’s made me not just more aware of the diversity of fungi, but curious about what I might find outside my door.

Alisha: Last summer my husband trimmed some branches from an oak tree. As I helped him cut them into smaller pieces, I noticed a little waving movement on one of the branches. I stooped down for a closer look. It appeared to be a piece of lichen balancing on the branch like a tight-rope walker. It wobbled from side to side and inched forward a tiny bit – an insect covered in lichens! The insect was using lichen as camouflage, maybe to protect itself from predators, or to sneak up on unsuspecting prey, or both! Before researching fungi for this book, I didn’t know that some insects cover themselves in lichens. But armed with that info, I was ready to discover one in my own backyard. Who knows what else I’ll discover!

Remember to check out our Funky Fungus Fridays over at my author Facebook page, and Alisha’s #FungiFriday posts on Twitter

Check back next month for our Happy Book Birthday celebration! Funky Fungi, 30 Activities for Exploring Molds, Mushrooms, Lichens, and More is part of the Chicago Review Press “Young Naturalists” series. You can find out more about our book at the publisher’s website. It will hit bookstore shelves next month! But if you can’t wait, you can pre-order it at your favorite local bookstore, or online at Bookshop.org

Crow Smarts & author interview

Crow Smarts: inside the brain of the world's brightest bird (Scientists in the Field series)
by Pamela S. Turner; photos by Andy Comins
80 pages; ages 10 - 12
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016

"Is a crow smarter than a second grader?" That's the question this book opens with - and the answer is a resounding "yes". But you might not recognize crow intelligence unless you know what you're looking for. They don't write essays or take multiple choice tests. What they do is solve problems.

In this book, author Pamela Turner spends time with scientists studying New Caledonian crows. In the wild, these birds fashion tools to spear their food. One chapter focuses on how a juvenile crow learns tool-making from his parents and by trial-and-error. She devotes an entire chapter to tool-making and another to the challenges that scientists presented to the birds including problems that required multiple steps to solve. You can see New Caledonian crows solving problems here.

What I love about this book - about Turner's nonfiction in general - is that it is fun to read! She takes you into the jungle with the scientists, and shares the logic crows use to puzzle out solutions. There are maps and sidebars and an "ask the author" section at the end.

I just had to "ask the author" Three Questions, which Pamela graciously answered.

Archimedes: What inspired you to write about crow intelligence?

Pamela: For the past 12 years I've been a volunteer at Lindsay Wildlife Hospital in Walnut Creek, California. The first time I saw a baby crow, someone was syringe-feeding into its gaping mouth. Crow babies make a funny high-pitched sound when you feed them. Also, they are very interactive and play with their food and other things. Eventually I became a crow and raven specialist and even brought baby crows home to raise in my own house. When I was writing the book about tool-using dolphins, I'd collected lots of information about crows... so I thought I'd do a book focusing on the crows.

Archimedes: What sort of research did you do?

Pamela: I read articles and books, and then went into the field with the scientists. I spent five days in a blind! Part of the research was in the forest and part was in the aviary, One of the reasons I got excited about this project is the connection between tool use and language. When scientists look at brain scans, the parts of the brain that light up when making stone tools are the same as language centers.

Archimedes: What do you love best about writing for kids?

Pamela: Delving into a subject I'm excited about and sharing it. With science it's all about going out with the scientists into the field. With biographies, it's interesting to see how someone's early childhood experiences got them started or helped to mold their lives. For example, Tyrone Hayes loved frogs as a kid. He didn't know you could study frogs for a living, yet he followed his passion and became "the frog scientist".

Find out more about Pamela and her books over at her website. Today's review is part of the STEM Friday roundup. Drop by STEM Friday blog for more science books and resources. Review copy provided by publisher

Animal Teachers

Animal Teachers
by Janet Halfmann; illus. by Katy Hudson
36 pages; ages 4-8
Blue Apple Books, 2014

It's back-to-school time, so grab your lunch bucket and your notebook and your number-2 pencil and hustle out the door so you don't miss the bus. As you head into the classroom, did you ever wonder how animal kids learn? They don't go to school. Do they even have teachers?

It turns out that polar bears and penguins and chimps and elephants - animals of all kinds - do have a lot of lessons to learn. Animal Teachers provides a window into the wild classrooms of the animal world.

Young otters have to learn how to swim, and joeys (baby kangaroos) need to learn some self-defense skills. Fortunately their moms teach them these skills. Other youngsters learn by copying what the adults around them are doing. In this book we see young animals learning how to run, fish, and communicate. This is a fun book for kids just starting school - and kids who are learning at home.

What sort of things are you learning ~ and who are your teachers?
Drop by STEM Friday to see what other science books and resources bloggers are sharing. Review copy provided by the publisher.

Baby Birds Need Password for Supper

Juvenile superb fairy wren. (Wikimedia commons)

Like any other baby bird, fairy-wrens sing for their supper. But they have to go one step further and give mama bird a secret password before she hands over the worm. Not only do fairy-wren nestlings have passwords, but each family has a different password – a single unique note that nestlings incorporate into their begging calls.

And they learn this password before they’re born – while they are still in the egg. Mama birds sing to their eggs to teach them their special“feed me” song. The mama birds also teach their mate and any helpers the secret password as well.

Why? Because parasitic cuckoos sometimes lay their eggs in fairy-wren nests. Baby birds need lots of feeding, and cuckoos tend to be greedy, gobbling up the food when given a chance. So if a mama bird can tell which nestlings are her own, she can feed them – and not the imposter.

Each fairy-wren family has its own password, too; and it’s learned, not inherited. When scientists switched eggs (they put one mom’s eggs in another’s nest), the hatchlings sang the “feed me” song that matched their foster-mom, not their biological mom.

So next time you’re at the supper table and mom says, “what do you say?” – you’d better pay attention. Could be your family has a special password, too. Check out more cool news and resources at STEM Friday.