Announcing our Earth Day Contest

Using Dawn books to educate children about nature? We want to know!

 

To celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Earth Day, Dawn Publications is giving away $350 in books to educators and their students. Teachers are encouraged to share their experiences – both inside and outside the classroom – on connecting children with nature using Dawn books. Whether you’re a home school teacher, camp counselor, or a traditional classroom teacher we’re interested in your inspiring stories.

How to Enter

Each entry should include a minimum one page story or synopsis on how you have used Dawn books to inspire and educate children about nature. Supplemental items, such as pictures or lesson plans, are encouraged but not required. Any entry that includes a picture of a child must include parental consent for its use. In addition, please make sure that your entry includes the following information:

• Teacher’s Name
• School Name
• Address
• Phone number

Entries should be emailed to contest@dawnpub.com or mailed to Dawn Publications, 12402 Bitney Springs Rd., Nevada City, CA 95959. All entries must be received by 11:59 pm PST on Earth Day, April 22nd, 2010.

Winning entries will be announced on May 1st, 2010 and may be featured on our website.

Click here for complete contest rules.

Not sure if your classroom project is eligible? Have a question about the rules? Give us a call at1-800-545-7475.

Spread your wings with The BLUES!

Author and teacher Carol Malnor, has put together another exciting group of activities to educate children on the joys of birds and birding. (If you missed the first installment, look for it here!) Today’s activities encourage children to get up, go outside, and explore their “inner bird”. In the first activity, “What’s your Wingspan?”, children will increase their awareness of the different sizes of the birds that are found in the book The BLUES go Birding Across America. In the second activity, “Physical Flit-ness”, kids are encouraged to move around and perform “bird activities” as they move from station to station. Whether performed by a group of children in a classroom setting, or one on one, these activities will help parents and educators encourage the next generation of birdwatchers.

 

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

 

The BLUES in the Classroom

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)

Conversations with the Artist: Marianne Berkes

This week Dawn Publications editor Glenn Hovemann interviews author Marianne Berkes about her writing, her motivation, and her involvement with kids. Marianne has spent much of her life with children as a teacher, children’s theater director and children’s librarian. She knows how much children enjoy brilliantly illustrated, interactive picture books with predictable text about real animals. She retired to write full time and visit schools, libraries and literary conferences. Marianne is the author of eight (and counting!) published picture books for children including the newly released Going Home: A Mystery of Animal Migration.

Glenn: Marianne, your life has revolved around kids, it seems, as a teacher, children’s librarian and children’s theater director. Oh, and parent, too!

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!

Behind the Scenes with Cris Arbo

Illustrator Cris Arbo gives us a behind the scenes look at how she creates her artwork. For those who have a copy of the Dawn books mentioned, you will enjoy matching up the real life references to the scenes depicted in the books. Cris’s art has appeared in books, magazines, calendars, cards, murals, and in animated feature films, TV shows, and commercials. When not at the drawing board or visiting schools she gardens and explores the beautiful countryside near her home in rural central Virginia.

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.

2010 Dawn Publications | RSS | Mantled Howler Monkey from The Forever Forest by Kristin Joy Pratt-Serafini.