Download the activities (PDF Format) here:
• Demonstration: What’s your Wingspan?
• Stations Activity: Physical Flit-ness

Carol Malnor, author of several teacher’s guides and the newly released The BLUES Go Birding Across America has put together several classroom activities for teachers to download. In this first installment, Carol encourages educators to “Make the Most of Resources” and utilize the birding resources of several organizations for different activities. She has also prepared several “Suggestions for Reading Aloud” that help children get the most out of reading the book. If you need to mark a page, or save your spot, you’ll find the downloadable BLUES Bookmarks will come in handy as well.

Download the activities here:

• The BLUES – Make the Most of Resources
• The BLUES – Suggestions for Reading Aloud
• The BLUES – Downloadable Bookmarks (2 MB)

Marianne: And now a grandparent! I have always loved being around kids, seeing the world through their eyes. They spark my creativity as I keep writing, learning and growing, no matter how old I get! When I was a teacher in New York, I had a poster on the wall of two children holding hands walking down a path in the woods that said “To love someone, is to always allow them to grow,” and I truly believe that!

Glenn: Having a flair for the dramatic is incredibly helpful with kids.

Marianne: There is an anonymous saying that I often use at school visits and conferences: “Tell me and I forget; show me and I remember; involve me and I understand!” When I present at schools I draw the reader in through music, movement, and reader’s theater, for example. Kids learn by doing and I love it when a kid really gets “inside” a book. Of course the wonderful illustrations in my Dawn books really grab them, I think. There is so much to be seen as well as heard in these picture books. When there is this perfect balance of art and with a lively text, I am always so pleased.

Glenn: You use few words, but you use them well.

Marianne: Thank you! A picture book is often more difficult to write than a chapter book because your text needs to be tight, but rich in language. One of my mentors, Barbara Lucas, an editor who conducted some wonderful writer’s workshops at Vassar College, used to tell us to “barebone” our books and I try to do that.

Glenn: And you like to use rhyme and rhythm.

Marianne: I think kids are naturally “wired” for sound and rhythm. So writing in rhyme really works for me. Repetition and rhyme are a great way for kids to share in a story, especially if they are just beginning to read. Rhyme also gives the book a forward motion that you don’t always get with prose. I like to think I’m making music with my words! Also, in some of my books, I use predictable text, so the reader is tempted to turn the page to see what is next. I often “think in pictures” when I start out with my idea, which is kind of odd since I’m no artist. But, it works for me, even though when the book is published, the illustrator may have done something completely different.

Glenn: You write in the style of fiction but use factual content. So you are imparting the feel of a story, but keeping it educational and true to nature.

Marianne: Writing “creative non-fiction” is a fun way to introduce a topic to young learners. I try to keep my text lyrical with simple facts sprinkled throughout the pages. Once a kid’s interest is aroused, you hope he or she will want to read more about the topic I’m writing about. So at the end of each of my books there is a glossary so the reader can learn more. And of course everything has to be accurate.

Glenn: And to keep it accurate, you have to research your topic. Thank goodness you used to be a librarian!

Marianne: It’s fun to learn so much when doing the research. As you know, I like to write about animals and nature, so when you asked me to write a book about the planets, it was a real challenge. There were lots of revisions, but with each one there came a clearer understanding of where I was going with this book. I was thrilled when Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium, endorsed it.

Glenn: Your first book with us, Seashells at the Seashore, must have been a lot easier! I know you live near the ocean.

Marianne: It sure was! My Dad was a boat builder and I also lived near the sea growing up as a child in New York. And now in Florida I can’t walk the beach without picking up at least a few seashells—even now, ten years after I wrote that book.

Glenn: What led you to write that book?

Marianne: On a visit to Sanibel Island I became fascinated with the variety of shells I found there. That day I came back with bulging pockets, and immediately started writing a book for kids so that when they went to the beach, they too could discover the amazing creatures who create these incredible works of art. At that time, as a children’s librarian, I knew not many children’s books had been written about seashells. And because Dawn connects kids to nature, you were my first choice when I submitted this manuscript.

Glenn: Thanks.

Marianne: I love working with all of you at Dawn since I believe discovering nature should be a life-long adventure. I agree with your mission statement, “We aspire to awaken children to the discovery that they are part of something magnificent. Each of our products is a unique window into the web of life, that grounded in nature, weaves us all together.” I think it’s important for children to be grounded in nature, today more than ever!

I am fascinated by detail, particularly that found in nature. People remark on how complex my paintings appear to be, but they are actually based on the simplicity that I find in the structure of nature. If I draw a form, say a dandelion seed, and repeat it over and over, it creates a pattern and appears as a whole; in this case a dandelion puff. If I can find 200 different forms to repeat in a painting, interweaving and overlapping them with one another, the result is the appearance of a larger form – a whole, the image of the painting you see.

Our visual world is put together in this way. Billions of forms with their own sets of patterns interact with one another to make larger forms and so on. What an amazing world!

Working on nature books for kids allows me to help others to see the detail and beauty of our natural world. I want to make the viewer feel like they are in that world, not just looking at it. My past experience in theater helps me with this. An illustrator needs to be a producer, director, choreographer, set and lighting designer, as well as an actor. Portraying characters (be they people, insects, animals, or plants) that the viewer can empathize with is so important.

In my books you will see lots of visual subplots that are not mentioned in the text but serve to complement and aid the storytelling, i.e., in All Around Me I See there is no mention in the text of a family on a hike. The family, specifically the little girl, allows the reader to “travel” with them, seeing the world they see.

	All Around Me I See My daughter, Arianna, as the mom; her brother-in-law, Jack, as the dad; and our friend Makayla, posing.
	All Around Me I See To get the feeling of the little girl flying in her dream, my daughter, Lisi, coached Makayla on the trampoline. (We put fairy wings on her and as she bounced up and down she exclaimed, “I’m a fairy, I’m a fairy!”)
	All Around Me I See I needed to portray a bullfrog leaping. Although I could hear them in our local pond, I never could catch any. However, we knew our friend, Jay, who is very fond of frog legs, might be able to help. He caught this one at night. The frog was a cooperative model and we let him go by the river after the photo shoot.
	All Around Me I See At the end of the story the dreaming girl returns to the family tent which is backlit by a huge moon. The car headlights helped me envision what the tent would look like.
The story of In A Nutshell portrays an acorn which grows into a 300+ year old oak tree. To show this passage of time I created a world of human activity, something not mentioned in the text. This idea was sparked by a suggestion from my husband, Joseph Anthony, who authored the book. Joseph also built a model of the log cabin which I used as a reference to help me depict the cabin in the book.
	In A Nutshell Joseph is a carpenter as well, and built this scale model for me to work from. He remarked it was the fastest he ever built a house!
	In A Nutshell Joseph as a pioneer carrying a “log” for the cabin.
	In A Nutshell Pocahontas and John Smith assisting me in depicting the cabin at an early stage.
Thorough research of my subjects is extremely important. I use real life, the library, and the web to make sure my details are correct. I also have a large collection of nature magazines and drawers full of photos filed into categories and sub-categories in my studio.
	Some of my reference magazines.
When portraying a person or creature several times in a book I need to see how each part (arm, leg, foot) would look at various angles.In The Trees, Honeybees shows hundreds of bees coming and going, and I had to make sure every angle of every body part was accurate. Since we had a hive of feral bees in a tree in our back yard I had the opportunity to observe and photograph them myself.
	In The Trees, Honeybees The entrance of the wild hive in our backyard. I was quite a distance away with a zoom lens.
	In The Trees, Honeybees On cold days the bees are sluggish. This gave me a chance to have a close look inside. There were some dead bees near the entrance, which I brushed onto the cloth below. In the studio I could examine them closely with my magnifying glass.
Depicting the creature accurately is not enough. The ecosystem in which it functions and all the creatures and plants it interacts with must be accurate. For the “Bee” book I had to learn their behavior and their complex social system. I had to make sure the shape of the honeycomb was depicted properly and the brood, honey, and pollen stores were all in the specific typical placement honeybees use. Rendering all those hexagonal chambers in the proper perspective was a definite challenge! I learned as well that honeybees will forage some flowers for nectar only and other flowers for pollen only. So much to learn and to depict accurately!
	In The Trees, Honeybees A worker collecting nectar from a sedum in our garden.
Champions Of The Ocean has eight biographies of ocean explorers, and each chapter begins with an anecdote of that person as a child. For those who had been born in the late 1800’s to early 1900’s their childhood photos were either of poor quality or non-existent. Often I would use a model who I thought resembled that person as I imagined they would have looked as a child.
	Champions Of The Ocean Our friend, Zachary, as William Beebe peering through the bushes.
As a girl, Eugenie Clark used to visit the New York Aquarium. The Aquarium’s photo archivist helped me with this by furnishing photos of the Aquarium’s interior around 1930 when it was located in Battery Park. I added Eugenie and some seahorses to help the experience come alive. I often use friends & family members as models as well.
	All Around Me I See Jack, Makayla, and Ari
	In The Trees, Honeybees My daughter, Julie, as the mom in our backyard garden. I also used a photo of her as a girl to portray her own daughter.
	In A Nutshell Our daughter, Alina with Joseph.
	In A Nutshell Our friend, Michael, as the other half of the swing duo.
	In The Trees, Honeybees To get a bee’s-eye-view I took this one of Joe “going to work” in the morning.
	In The Trees, Honeybees Again from the roof, this is Alina.
	In A Nutshell Our friend, Frances, as the mom “eating pie”.
	In A Nutshell Our friend, Martha, “picking cherries”.
I love working with my husband. Since he wrote In A Nutshell and The Dandelion Seed we were able to bounce ideas off one another. He often comes up with clever ideas for our projects that I can develop into illustrations, and we have several book projects in various stages of development which we hope will eventually become published books.
	The Dandelion Seed In order to portray the seed floating over the house at night, I took this shot of our house from the treehouse. As the illustration is a night scene, I went back up into the treehouse at 1 A.M. when the moon was casting its light at the angle I wanted. I sat up there (it was about 20?) for about an hour memorizing the colors, which are so different at night!
There are so many stories to tell — each illustration has its own saga, and when I visit schools I love to tell the kids tidbits about how each illustration came to be. I also like to show the process of how the books were created using sketches, models, and finished paintings. Giving talks, for me, is a great way to balance the solitary time I spend in the studio creating the books.

This week we are excited to announce a collection of 18 different educational activities that Marianne has put together to accompany her award winning book, Over in the Ocean: In a Coral Reef. This collection includes activities ranging from water play to creating fish puppets. We hope that you enjoy this free download.

For more information on Marianne Berkes, please visit her website at www.MarianneBerkes.com. To find out more information on her school visits, click here.

Glenn: Gary, you call yourself a photojournalist, and for more than ten years you have been documenting the effects of climate change. What led you to do that?

Gary: I was in Alaska in 1997 trying to photograph migrating caribou as part of my coverage of wilderness and biodiversity. This was my main interest then and I had photographed and written about it for many magazines. But while waiting for a bush plane to take me out to the Arctic Refuge, I met some scientists who told me about climate change already happening in Alaska. I did some research and two years later launched a project to follow those and other scientists to their research locations to see if I could document the changes. No one else was doing this.

Glenn: And this quest has taken you all over the world, to places far beyond the tourist trails!

Gary: Yea, I had no idea! When I put the word out to magazine editors, one came right back with an assignment to Antarctica. I found it easy to get to locations in Alaska and places in the U.S. But I was surprised to find science being done all over the world and soon found myself trying to find the funds and the connections to go to Bangladesh, the Alps and Andes, Australia, Sweden, China, and obscure tiny atolls in the Pacific Ocean. It has been a really enlightening and sometimes frustrating quest, but now I have meaningful images and stories from 23 nations on all continents.

Glenn: You?ve written about your observation and lots of photographs in a dramatic book, Earth Under Fire: How Global Warming is Changing the World, released by the University of California Press.

Gary: I was lucky to get a contract with them and their advance helped me get to my final locations — and they have stayed with the book and allowed me to update, including putting out a paperback with 100 changes that came out at the beginning of the Obama Administration. They also backed me as I was writing it, because I wanted to have a lot about what people were doing about global warming ? beyond the science and the bad news ? and that part of the book is still current and really the most important message.

Glenn: So where did the idea of a children?s book come from?

Gary: I?ve known Lynne Cherry for about 15 years and as I began my global warming project we occasionally talked of how to do a kids book about it. Finally it was the stories of the scientists themselves, the adventure of fieldwork and the excitement they conveyed to me of discovering how the world works, that gave us the key to making it interesting to kids.

Glenn: It?s potentially a scary subject, and Dawn Publications is interested in creating a positive relationship, a bonding experience, between children and nature.

Gary: We also didn?t want to scare kids, which most other books on climate change seemed to do. Or to lay a lot of blame. So we emphasized the science, the gathering of data from observations, the building up of facts into a theory. It is really a book about science works. And along the way Lynne?s connections in the education world brought in teachers who were already teaching weather and climate, the programs that involve kids in real observations of butterflies and plants, and some stories about how kids influenced schools and communities about climate change.

Glenn: Your book for adults Earth Under Fire and your book for children, How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate are essentially about the same thing, but the tone is way different. Was it difficult to make that switch?

Gary: It is not easy to write well at kids? language level. We took a lot of time and got advice in both defining each scientific term and in the general word choice.

Glenn: This is your first book for children, Gary. What did you learn about writing for kids?

Gary: Actually the sharpest learning curve came — and is still coming — is speaking and interacting with kids. They are sharp and engaged — and some of them are scared about the future and wanting to do something. After we finished the book, which has three stories of middle school students taking the initiative in school or their towns, Lynne began a film project about kids who are active in fighting climate change. She found many more kid projects and has expanded the filming overseas. I think when you write for kids you have to give them accurate and understandable information, help show what needs to be
done and where the information is — and get out of the way.

That dilemma was at the top of the editor?s mind at Dawn Publications when he first saw the book proposal by Lynne Cherry and Gary Braasch that became How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate. After all, news about global warming is so bad that many young people question whether a world will even exist for them to inherit.

Fortunately, young people have been involved with climate science for a long time. From 1900 to 1923, students all over Nova Scotia, Canada, collected data on the first arrival of various bird species, the first fruiting of various trees, first autumn frosts, and so on. This data has been important to compare with existing data. The authors discovered that some leading climate scientists are working with young people in the U.S. Russia, and elsewhere. Young people have also spearheaded climate solutions, such as the campaign to cut back on school bus idling.

By emphasizing the involvement of young people and targeting the middle school audience, the book is well suited for young people and has a decidedly hopeful, forward-looking tone. The editor consulted Prof. David Sobel of Antioch University New England, a leading advocate for age-appropriateness in children?s environmental literature. Sobel examined the manuscript and ended up writing an introduction. ?Empowerment needs to be a core element of the approach,? he wrote. ?This book invites you to empower students.?

How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate is now available in a paperback version!

Louv?s book came out after I began this series, but the message was essentially the same. Kids can find an incredible world of discoveries in the simplest of things or the simplest of places. If a child turns over a rock and discovers a creature she?s never seen before then my book will have done its job. If you take a group of kids out for a walk through a grassy field then Louv?s book will have done its job. Simply put, we?re all in this together?as we should be!

As an assist for teachers, I have compiled a whole lot of ?Activities, Projects, and Ton of Really Neat Ideas? to jump-start using Under One Rock in the classroom. Here are three of my favorite activities. You can download several download activities to my books by clicking here.

1. Invite each student in the class to select one of the animals illustrated in the book. Encourage each child to conduct necessary library research on his or her identified species. Then, invite each student to write a series of diary entries told from the perspective of the creature, for example, ?A Day in the Life of a Slug? or ?My Life as an Ant.?

2. Invite students to select a rock near the school. Encourage them to take periodic photographs of the rock throughout the year and maintain a diary or journal of the events or changes that take place around the rock. Who comes to visit the rock (animals)? What does the rock look like when it rains, snows or is sunny outside? Periodically, talk with students about any changes in the surrounding environment and how those changes may be similar to or different from some of the events in the story.

3. Invite students to each select one of the critters mentioned in the book. Invite each child to demonstrate the movement of that insect in a designated area. For example, for an earthworm, students can slither across the floor on their bellies; for a cricket, students can leap on their hands and knees. Provide opportunities for students to describe their movements and why they may be unique to each selected animal.

“The idea came to me while I was a summer camp counselor. The children were complaining about the mosquitoes. I often heard them whine, ?I wish there were no such things as mosquitoes.? I knew not to argue with them. I wanted them to know on a visceral level that all things in nature are important, that every creature plays a vital role, and that we are all connected.

“Then I remembered fishing with my father and some of the things I learned from him. Though the story took place over several fishing trips, every detail in the story really happened. The kernel of the story is the simple question, Do you like to listen to bird songs? Do you like to catch fish? Then we need mosquitoes, because they feed the fish and the birds. I have performed this story for audiences of all ages from elementary school students to Ph.D. Aquatic Ecologists.

“When I perform the story, I often stop and engage the audience in conversations about Why and How? Why does the mosquito lay so many eggs? Why does the great blue heron swallow the fish head first? How is our life like the life of a dragonfly? These are the kinds of questions any parent or teacher can ask when they read this book to a child whose sense of wonder they wish to nurture.”