*Picture book about volcanoes–found in non-fiction section–told in poem form
*Subject matter: A volcano erupting and how it affects life around it
*Rating: Volcano Wakes Up! is a wonderful book to teach kids about volcanoes and the life around them. Love it!

Short, short summary: In Volcano Wakes Up!, Lisa Westburg Peters uses poetry to tell the “story” of a small volcano. She follows the volcano’s activity throughout one day, and also includes the perspective of the ferns growing around the volcano, a lava flow cricket, a small black road on the active volcano, and the sun and moon. This book presents a very creative way to tell about an erupting volcano along with wonderful cut-paper illustrations by Steve Jenkins. Volcano Wakes Up! is a great book for use with science curriculum in the classroom or in a home school program.

So, what do I do with this book?

1. Let students research the facts they learn from the poems in the book to find out more facts about volcanoes, ferns, and so on. The author provides more detailed notes in the back of the book that you can share with your students. Students can create presentations of their facts with illustrations styled after Steve Jenkins work.

2. Not only can this book teach your students or children (if you home school) about volcanoes, but it also exposes them to different forms of poetry. What are the poems like in this book? Challenge your students to write a similar poem–maybe instead of a volcano, they can use a mountain as their subject. Instead of a fern–they can use a tree and so on.

3. Study with students what other effects volcanoes have on the land, plant life, animal life, and even human life when they erupt. You can do a lesson on cause and effect with this activity, also.

My son received this book as a gift last year. I'm not normally drawn to straight, realistic collage illustration such these by Steve Jenkins. After many slow reads with my son, the book and art have grown on me. It's a simple story, sort of an exploration of baby animals that ties back to a human baby. Mem Fox's light text reads aloud so well, and the illustrations are large and focused on just the animals. You really get a chance to lose yourself in the details here.

I LOVE books by Steve Jenkins. He's become one of those go-to-authors for making suggestions to picky readers or those parents that just don't quite know how to get their children interested in non-fiction titles. Well...his newest is out and it's just as brilliant and beautiful as all his previous titles. A sure crowd-pleaser.

Down, Down, Down: A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea is like the Planet Earth BBC series on the ocean, in a children's non-fiction book. Jenkins covers typical animals that we've all heard of (sea turtles, tuna, sharks, jellyfish) and well as some amazing marine animals most of us probably have never heard of, including Siphonophore, a totally weird looking bioluminescent animal, the Pelican Eel which is giving me shivers just looking at the picture, and the Fang Tooth which appears like it would bite your arm off in 2 seconds flat. Kids are going to LOVE these cool, creepy sea animals at the bottom of the sea.

Each page has a different theme based around the place in the ocean it's located, such as The Twilight Zone starting at 660 feet, the Dark Zone, starting around 3300 feet, and finally the Marianas Trench which you can find around 36000 feet. CRAZY!! Different animals in these regions are showcased on each page, fabulously illustrated.

A winner for sure, Down, Down, Down belongs on all school and library shelves. I would also highly recommend watching the Planet Earth disc featuring sea life...you'll get to see some of these neat animals, including the glow-in-the-dark fish!

To learn more or to purchase, click on the book cover above to link to Amazon.

Down, Down, Down: A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea
Steve Jenkins
40 pages
Non-fiction
Houghton-Mifflin
9780618966363
May 2009

What if, rather than composing an original blog, an author simply took the text of a recent (this morning) on-line interview — the interviewer's questions and their answers — and posted them? One might suspect this blogger of being lazy. Or (full disclosure) of being way behind schedule on a few projects.

That being said, however, I thought this particular interview might be of interest. It's interesting to me, of course, because it's all about me. There might be one or two other people out there who also find it fascinating for this reason. But probably not. The other reason that it might be of interest is that the questions come from a magazine in Korea — Mom & Enfant — and the cultural and language differences have resulted in questions that are sometimes charmingly disingenuous. They are, in many ways, more like the quetions that kids ask during school visits that those that come from people in the U.S. who write about children's books. I hope the folks at Mom & Enfant do not mind me posting this. If so, I apologize.

What is the most important thing when you make a picture book?

The idea. If it’s a good one, the text and art seem to come together in a natural way (not necessarily easily, but in a way that seems to make sense as it happens).

Where do you get the idea and inspiration for your works?
From your childhood, life, family, friends?

I used to get many of my ideas from questions my own children asked. But now even my youngest child (he’s almost 11) is getting a little old to ask some of the really simple questions that used to lead to book concepts. So my wife (and co-author) Robin Page have become sounding boards for each other – we frequently bounce book ideas back and forth, and in the process sometimes hit upon something we both like. Ideas also come from books, films about nature, and just looking around.

I think you enjoy painting animals. Why? Why crocodile?

Illustrations of animals seem to have more energy than illustrations of many other subjects. I also find that the distortions and inaccuracies that always creep into my pictures have the effect of giving the animals a bit of personality. Those same distortions would probably make an illustration of a human downright creepy. And, of course, animals are frequent subjects because kids are fascinated by them. Animals can be used to introduce lots of concepts other than biology – geological time scales, the qualities of different habitats, the relationship between size, strength and weight, and so on. Crocodiles are a favorite subject because their wrinkled skin and the well-defined seams where different parts of their bodies meet lend themselves well to translation into cut-paper. Insects and fish are also good subjects.


What kind of influence do you want to give people? What kind of feeling and emotion do you expect to give people?

Ideally a reader would look at the world from a slightly different perspective — and maybe look a little more closely — and experience a greater appreciation of the complexity and beauty of nature. It’s easy to take something absolutely extraordinary – a tree, say – for granted, because it’s so familiar.


I think all of you works are precious. But please choose the best. What is the reason?

I guess I’d choose ‘Life on Earth’, because it was the most difficult book to write. I wasn’t sure if I could explain the Theory of Evolution to a seven-year-old, but I think that perhaps I succeeded. And, as you know, there is a lot of controversy in this country about teaching evolution to children, which is a real shame. So I hope that this book helped a few children see past the politics to the clarity and elegance of Darwin’s ideas.


Did you enjoy reading a picture book during your childhood? Which one was your favorite? Why?

I read lots of picture books – mostly fiction. There were not that many non-fiction picture books around when I was a child. My favorite – it was illustrated, but not really a picture book – was “All About Strange Beasts of the Past” by Roy Chapman Andrews. It was about his search for fossils in Mongolia in the 1930s.

What kind of a boy were you? Did you enjoy painting? How about your family? Were they interested in painting?

I was a bookish boy, but I enjoyed sports. I had a microscope, a chemistry set, and kept lots of bugs, frogs, turtles, etc. that I captured in nearby fields and ponds. My father was a scientist – a physicist – but he painted as a hobby.


Did your parents have an influence on your job and painting?

My Father encouraged my interest in science and art.


If not, which environment and education make what you are?

I attended design school in college and have worked for many years as a graphic designer. I’m sure this helped me become an illustrator.

What activities do you think could help to improve children’s creativity and imagination?

Reading, being read to, travel, reading, going to museums, reading, watching some of the amazing films about nature that are now available (e.g., David Attenborough’s BBC films on the ocean, birds, mammals, etc.). Being listened to and taken seriously by adults when a child asks a question. Looking up the answer with a child if you don’t know it. Reading and being read to. And providing simple tools like a magnifying glass or butterfly net will often lead to an exploration of some aspect of the natural world.

What did you do when you were a kid?

Read a lot, drew pictures, explored the fields and woods around my house, played basketball, thought about girls, made dangerous concoctions with my chemistry set.


What kind of book do you think is a good picture book? What kind of illustration is the best? Why?

A good picture book has words that wouldn’t work without the pictures and (usually) pictures that wouldn’t work without the words. They don’t restate each other, but each adds something essential. A good picture book respects the intelligence of the child and doesn’t try to preach or teach an overt moral lesson.

There is no ‘best’ illustration. Illustration that is an honest expression of the way an artist sees the world will have a truth and power that children intuitively recognize.

There are various cultures all over the world. What do you think the reason lots of people from foreign countries like your works regardless of culture difference?

I think a child’s interest in nature and animals is universal. I’d speculate (without any real scientific data to support my speculation) that it’s part of our shared cultural memory. For most of human history an awareness of animals – as food, danger, or as a source of information about weather, water, and so on – was essential to our survival as a species.

In the world, there are so many countries, so many customs. Did you recognize the characteristics and differences of illustration and picture books each country? What kind of difference did you recognize?

I do see some differences in, for instance, Asian illustration and European illustration. Artists are naturally influenced by and refer to the visual arts traditions and popular culture of the places they live. But one can’t apply this sort of generalization to an individual illustrator. There might be an American illustrator who references Japanese prints and a Korean illustrator who is influenced by American comic books.


What do you think is the characteristic of picture book or illustration of USA?

Children's book illustration is amazingly diverse, so I don't think I can characterize US illustration in any overall way. The US is also a very young country and doesn’t have the centuries of art heritage that an illustrator working in China or Italy might refer to.

What kind of efforts have you made to read children’s mind and understand their world?

I don’t try to read children’s minds. I do try to keep in perspective their language skills and what I imagine is their general knowledge of the world, so I don’t write text that is too difficult for them to understand. I’m referring here to vocabulary, grammar, and metaphors or comparisons rather than concepts. I think even young children can grasp most of the ideas I’m writing about in as easily as an adult – they just need them explained in words they understand and in a context they can relate to. Other than that, I write about things that I find interesting myself. If I’m truly interested, I think that comes through in a book’s word’s and images.

Vulture View

Author: April Pulley Sayre
Illustrator: Steve Jenkins
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co. (October 2, 2007)
ISBN-10: 0805075577
ISBN-13: 978-0805075571

"Wings stretch wide to catch a ride on warming air. Going where?"

Did you know turkey vultures don't hunt? These birds like their food already dead which is why they're known as nature's clean-up crew.

April Pulley Sayre does a wonderful job of introducing young readers to the turkey vulture in an easy-to-read poetic text. If you're like me, you've probably seen these scavengers swooping high above your highways, (we have one here at our local zoo, too)--but never thought too much about them. After reading this book, you'll think twice about the bird with the ugly bare-skinned face when you see them soaring high in the sky. The final two pages are a "Get to Know Vultures" section that provides information about vultures and a suggestion to check out the Turkey Vulture Society's website at www.vulturesociety.homestead.com, which contains facts and lots of wonderful photos.

Caldecott Honor-winning artist Steve Jenkins provides gorgeous cut-paper collage illustrations in bold colors that pop off the page.

Companion book:

Condor's Egg (Endangered Species)




Nonfiction Monday takes place at various wonderful blogs throughout the Kidlitosphere! Today, you can check out the Roundup at Tales From the Rushmore Kid.

To see the blog schedule for Nonfiction Monday, please visit Anastasia Suen's Picture Book of the Day.

First, a thank you. Last month, I wrote about a year-long trip my family is planning, and asked for advice about home-schooling resources. I appreciate all of your suggestions about books, web resources, and strategies. I'm accumulating more of the same (most of which are applicable to anyone interested in educating children, in any context), and will make them the subject of a future blog.

I've enjoyed many of the recent posts that describe the authors' evolution as writers. There are many different stories, but everyone, despite having a distinct voice and point of view, seems to end up confronting the same issues: writing nonfiction simply, clearly, and engagingly. Precisely the qualities the previous sentence lacks.

Is it just me, or does something about the blog format foster a confessional mode of expression? Reading I.N.K. posts often makes me feel as if a mistake has been made — why am I in the company of so many writers who can express themselves with such eloquence and so little apparent effort?

I started making books for children as a form of visual expression, and I'm still trying to get comfortable with thinking of myself as a writer. Twenty years ago I was an experienced graphic designer, an inexperienced illustrator, and an even more inexperienced new father. Reading piles of books to my daughter — we started when she was too young to even sit up — started me thinking that making a book might be fun. Notice I say making, because my first books were really all about the images. From the beginning, however, I was drawn to nonfiction about the natural world, and I realized that words might be necessary if I wanted a book to convey much actual information. Or get published. I did make one wordless picture book — Looking Down — but the other subjects I was interested in exploring required some annotation.

Now, twenty books or so later, I find that writing has become my central preoccupation when I'm working on a book. I love the visual part of the process, and approach it with very little trepidation. I'm confident that I can solve a book's visual challenges, one way or another. Illustrating the book is a reward — it's like dessert. The writing, however, doesn't get any easier. Just the opposite, in fact. In my early books I was blissfully naive about the writing process. I just wrote down what I thought would explain the image on the page. I didn't rewrite as much. I was a designer and illustrator making a book, so I didn't worry too much about the text.

It's been the slowly developed recognition that I have as much responsibility (more?) to the words as to the images that has made writing more and more of a focus. I remember being surprised and a little bemused that teachers and librarians encountered at schools and conferences were reading my books and thinking about the way they were written, sometimes recognizing pattern and intention that had never occurred to me.

It's much more difficult than I imagined, being a writer. It's humbling, frustrating, exhausting, gratifying, and intoxicating (not in the Dylan Thomas sense, at least most of the time).

In the interests of making this post a little more than a self-absorbed soliloquy, I'll share a few of the books I've found helpful on my journey:

On Writing Well, 30th Anniversary Edition: The Classic Guide to Writing, by William Zinsser
(this book was recommended in a recent Vicki Cobb post, but it's well worth a repeat mention)

Also Zinsser's Writing to Learn.

This one is probably too obvious to mention, but I will anyway: The Elements of Style, by William Strunk and E.B. White. This link is to a new edition cleverly illustrated by Maira Kalman.

Bryson's Dictionary for Writers and Editors and his Bryson's Dictionary of Troublesome Words are both useful.

Ways of Telling: Conversations on the Art of the Picture Book, by Leonard Marcus, is a inspirational series of interviews with iconic children's book author/illustrators.

Finally, all of Edward Tufte's books are invaluable to anyone interested in the presentation of quantitaive information. Their subject is visual presentation, but Tufte does such a good job of explaining what he's showing us that they are also a useful resource for writers. You could start anywhere, but one of my favorites is Beautiful Evidence.

As I held my mouse today and stared at a blank screen for a few minutes in my typical pre-blog-writing ritual, I was reminded of a cartoon I saw years ago in The New Yorker. There were two frames. In the first, a man sits before a typewriter that holds a blank sheet of paper. He is staring out a window. The caption reads “Temporary writer’s bock”. In the second frame, the same man sits in the same position staring out a similar window, but this time he wears an apron and the words “Butcher Shop” appear on the glass in front of him. The caption reads “Permanent writer’s block.”

Since I am not wearing an apron, I’m confident that what I’m experiencing is only temporary. Still, there is a deadline.

So, I’ve decided to share a few entries from a list of things I routinely paste into a document eloquently titled “book idea random facts.” These are tidbits about the natural world that I have found especially interesting. So interesting, in fact, that entire books could be written about each of them. Wait. . . someone’s already done that?

But not the book I’d write. That’s why I don’t mind sharing. It’s an open-source approach to non-fiction writing, the only kind there should be. Besides, you might not even be interested.

I have added attributions and links with more information to a few items, where I could find them.

Here goes, in no particular order:

It’s difficult to imagine an animal of one species giving birth to one of another species, but if you think one generation at a time, you’ll recognize an unbroken link from child, to parent, to grandparent and so on from yourself back to the first unicellular life forms.

Humans did not evolve from modern apes, but humans and modern apes shared a common ancestor, a species that no longer exists. — National Academy of Sciences: Science and Creationism: A View from the National Academy of Sciences

There are fossils on the summit of Mount Everest. OK, this doesn’t come as a complete surprise, if you know a little bit about geology — specifically plate tectonics. Still pretty interesting. On a related note, my father, a physicist and astronomer who enjoys making calculations about this sort of thing, figured that if, as a surprising number of people assert, the flood in Genesis is the explanation for these fossils, and that the water covering Mt. Everest evaporated and is now part of the atmosphere, the earth’s atmospheric pressure should be about 900 times greater than it actually is.

An average person has ten times more bacteria cells living in their intestines than there are human cells in their body (which contains 10 trillion to 100 trillion human cells).

All living humans are the descendants of a single woman who lived in Africa between 100,00 and 200,000 years ago.

A piece of matter the size of a pea from a neutron star weighs far more than an aircraft carrier.

Roughly 100,000,000 neutrinos — tiny high-energy particles produced by stars — pass through each square centimeter of your body every second. On average, however, only once in a human lifespan there will be a collision between a neutrino and an atom in your body.

It’s so cold on Pluto that when the former planet is in the part of its orbit that is more distant from the sun its atmosphere — probably methane and nitrogen — freezes and falls to the ground.

Most of Earth’s biomass - the weight of all living things on earth - may exist in the form of subterranean bacteria.

Your probability of dying from an asteroid collision with the earth is about the same as that of perishing in a commercial airline accident.

The Andromeda galaxy and our own Milky Way are likely to collide in about three billion years. Not to worry. If you happen to be around to observe the collision, the stars in each galaxy are so spread out that you probably won’t be affected.

Life as we know it would be impossible without supernovae, since elements heavier than iron (many of which are required for life) form only when stars collapse and explode.

It’s likely that the eye has independently evolved at least 40 times throughout the history of life on earth.

Fold sheet of paper on itself 100 times, and the result will be an object thicker than the diameter of the known universe.

If a grain of sand represented all the matter in the universe, it would float in an otherwise empty box 20 miles on a side. (an Isaac Asimov paraphrase)

If a star is a grain of salt, the observable stars (naked eye) will fit into a teaspoon. All the stars in the universe will fill a sphere 8 miles across. — Stephen Hawking, A Briefer history of Time

There are many more molecules in a glass of water than there are glasses of water in the sea. There are also, to give another example, more cells in one finger than there are people in the world.
— Lewis Wolpert


I hope there was something here that made you stop, for just a moment, and gaze out that window. The one without “Butcher Shop” written on it.

Because I have amotivational syndrome (that’s a fancy way of saying that I’m lazy), I‘m going to link here to Stacy Mozer’s nice notes about a fantastic event that I attended yesterday. (Thank you, Stacy.)