Category Archives: Science

All the Water in the World

Summer in Michigan means swimming in lakes, running through sprinklers, diving into pools. It’s a good time of year to share All the Water in the World by George Ella Lyon and Katherine Tillotson.

Science, poetry, and art swirl together in this gorgeous picture book.
“That rain
that cascaded from clouds
and meandered down mountains,
that wavered over waterfalls
then slipped into rivers
and opened into oceans,
that rain has been here before.”

All the water in the world is all the water this world will ever have, so it’s our responsibility to keep this precious resource clean. George Ella Lyon has a free teacher’s guide on her website: georgellalyon.com with plenty of extension activities. I think it’s cool to recreate the water cycle with your students by putting hot water and a glass in a clear bowl, and covering the bowl with plastic cling wrap so they can see evaporation and condensation (for a much better explanation, go to easy-science-experiments.com). Talk about the lyrical language Lyon chose as well as the facts of the water cycle and you’ll hit the Core Standards of Craft & Structure plus Key Ideas & Details (love the two-fer!) Pay homage to Tillotson’s flowing art by pulling out the watercolors to illustrate the water cycle or why water is so important. And if it’s as hot where you are as it is in Michigan, get out the sprinklers as well!

A Little Book of Sloth

Body Actions

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There seems to be a direct correlation between the amount of days left in a school year and the amount of time students are able to sit still and focus. Now is the time to grab interesting, interactive, move-your-body books like Body Actions by Shelley Rotner and David A. White.

Body Actions is the kind of informational book with enough facts to be useful in a science unit and it’s still engaging enough to read for pleasure. Shelley Rotner’s fabulous photographs of kids are the basis for all the pictures, and David A. White made the illustrations that go over the photos and show what’s happening inside each body. Facts like “you have 206 bones in your body, and more than 50 are in your hands” are shown with a photograph of a kid’s hands playing the piano and one hand has all the bones drawn inside it. Each body system – skeletal, cardiac, digestive, etc. – is represented in kid-friendly terms.

Share Body Actions with your students. After you amaze them with all the cool anatomy facts (you have about 650 muscles in your body!) let them test out their own personal models. In the book you’ll learn that “you take about 14 breaths a minute.” Get out the stopwatch and have your students test this for themselves. You can do these experiments as a whole class or create a center for students to try them in small groups or pairs. Students can time themselves for one minute and count each breath. Then, create challenges. How many breaths do you take after 20 jumping jacks? How many breaths do you take after sitting quietly for two minutes? Do your students blink about 15 times a minute? If your digestive tract is about six times longer than you are tall, measure yourself and multiply your answer to find out just how long that tract is.

If you have a digital camera and a printer, take photos of your students in action and let them draw in on the printed photo their digestive system, their lungs, their heart, etc. Or get the big rolls of paper out, let students trace each other’s bodies so they can make a life-size drawing of their amazing interiors. Spend a little extra time outside if you can, and put those bodies in action!

For more information, please visit shelleyrotner. com.

Iggy Peck, Architect

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Long have I loved Andrea Beaty’s picture book series about a bear named Ted (grab Doctor Ted, Firefighter Ted, and Artist Ted from your local library and prepare to be charmed.) Then, I saw sitting on the shelf by the Ted books this gem, just waiting to tie in perfectly with science, math, and phonological awareness lessons.

Iggy Peck, Architect written by Andrea Beaty and illustrated by David Roberts will grab young readers on page 1:

“Young Iggy Peck is an architect
and has been since he was two,
when he built a great tower – in only an hour –
with nothing but diapers and glue.”

The story about a young boy who loves to build and saves the day with his architectural skills is told in fantastic rhyme. (Hello, Common Core Standard of Phonological Awareness!) But the beauty of this book is that after you’ve used it in reading lesson, it inspires all kinds of science, art, and math extensions.

When his class is stranded on a small island, Iggy teaches his classmates how to construct a suspension bridge from “boots, tree roots and strings, fruit roll-ups and things”. After sharing Iggy Peck, Architect, pull out Bridges by Seymour Simon to learn more about suspension bridges and how they work (and pat yourself on the back for Integrating Knowledge and Ideas, you Core Standard wizard.) You may choose to forgo tree roots and boots, but challenge your students to plan and construct a suspension bridge, perhaps between two tables, with materials like string, paper, straws, etc. Students can use graph paper like David Roberts did when they draw up their plans, measuring actual distances and then scaling the distances down on paper before they build. Your students will be measuring, counting, drawing, predicting, and revising as they work. Keep architecture books like Bridges! Amazing Structures to Design, Build, and Test by Carol A. Johmann and Elizabeth J. Rieth, or the wonderful David Macaulay books on hand for those inspired by Iggy Peck. As Miss Lila Greer, the teacher in Iggy Peck, Architect realizes:

“There are worse things to do when you’re in grade two
than to spend your time building a dream.”

For more information about the author, go to andreabeaty.com.

For more information about the illustrator, go to davidrobertsillustration.com.

The Day-Glo Brothers on a free app – what a bright idea!

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I’m a librarian partly because I couldn’t afford my book habit if I had to buy every book I read. So when I’m looking for e-books, I usually look for free ones (some call me cheap, I prefer “fantastically frugal”). But I don’t want crummy books – I want the good stuff! Leave it to Reading Rainbow to hook me up with quality children’s books for free (and a huge variety of even more titles if I want to pay for a subscription).

I downloaded the free Reading Rainbow app to my iPad and was greeted by Levar Burton ( a man who has lured more children to reading than the Pied Piper lured rats, but you don’t have to take *my* word for it.) I was thrilled to find one of my favorite biographies, with complete text and art, a bit of fun animation, and even a game to play.

The Day-Glo Brothers: the true story of Bob and Joe Switzer’s bright ideas and brand-new colors is written by Chris Barton and illustrated by Tony Persiani. Bob and Joe Switzer were in their father’s drugstore when they discovered that certain chemicals glow under ultraviolet light. With lots of experimenting and some accidental luck, the brothers invented colors that would glow even in sunlight, those neon colors called Day-Glo. It’s a “brilliant” story about perseverance, for, as Joe used to say, “If just one experiment out of a thousand succeeds, then you’re ahead of the game.”

So now you can share this enlightening biography (CCSS Range of Reading – check!) with your students for free in paper-book form from the library, or you can share it on iPads with the free Reading Rainbow app. Charlesbridge has a free activity guide to go with the book, along with an author interview and an animation on how fluorescence works. How fun would it be to put a blacklight in a lamp in your classroom and get fluorescent markers for an art project. Students can try making one of the props Joe used in his magic shows, or you can have students demonstrate with Day-Glo colors why we see the phases of the moon. A great biography on a free app – what a bright idea!

Kristen Remenar

Author, Librarian, National Speaker on Early Literacy