How to use this Page

I’ve been wondering how we authors can help teachers use our books. This, of course, requires that we learn more about what teachers actually do with our books in the classroom. So I created a questionnaire and Cheryl Harness gave it to Carol Hutchens, a teacher friend at Mountain View Elementary in Windsor, CO who went to the trouble of filling it out. The results are below. My questions are in boldface. Carol prefaces her responses as follows:

I'm a special education teacher for grades 3-5. I primarily work with 4th and 5th graders, teaching reading, writing and math in "core replacement" groups. Explanation: all of our 4th graders have reading at the same time, so the group I have is getting "core replacement" in my room at the same time their peers are being taught reading in the general education classroom. Same with math, writing and 5th grade reading. My school also has a literacy teacher (for students who are doing a bit better than mine academically) and a Title 1 reading teacher.

What kind of reading assignments do you give kids? In class, we all read the same story/book together. Sometimes, I'll let the kids read silently to themselves or in pairs, but this is usually not very effective because of their lack of reading skills.

How important do you feel it is for every kid in your class to read the same assignment on a topic? For my kiddos, this is very important. This way, I can be assured they are reading correctly, and we have wonderful discussions to ensure comprehension of the material. Most of my kids are way better verbally!

Do you feel you MUST teach from the textbook? Unfortunately, yes. If so, why? District requirement. But, I supplement a lot in my classroom by reading non-fiction books at the beginning of each reading class (the kids love books by Cheryl Harness!) and also by pulling in additional non-fiction books to support stories we're reading. (ie: 5th graders are reading a story about cowboys that mention Nat Love, an African American cowboy. He wrote a book about his experiences and I found it online. I copied it and shared selections of it with the kids - they loved it!)


Have you ever gone to the library and looked for books on the content you have to teach? Honestly - I usually hit half.com or ebay first. I like to purchase books with my own money, then I'll have them for the next years! I have quite a collection of books in my classroom and like to have them "at my fingertips" to pull for kids!

Have you ever used a trade (library) book on a subject covered by your textbook instead? Yes. If so, why? Usually because the story provided in the book I'm required to use doesn't go "in depth" enough about the subject. Also, I like to show my students that each and every book about a subject can offer different/additional information! For instance - my students are stunned to know that I personally own more than 50 books about Lewis and Clark.

How closely do you coordinate what you are teaching with your school librarian? H

With one exception, my school visits require that I perform. I do assembly programs designed to turn kids on to science and to motivate them to get involved in reading in general and reading my books in particular. It is this one exception that I want to talk about. This blog is part of our theme this month to share exciting classroom uses for our books, which you can find in our database on our new website, INK Think Tank.

I was invited to Cummings Elementary School in Alief, Texas back in 1986. Cummings was one of those Eisenhower Award schools. (I’m not certain if the award is still given.) The building was fairly new and the teachers were rightly proud of it since they had had a say in the design. Every classroom opened onto an atrium—the heart of the school— the library. The mission of the school, among other things was and is to encourage independent and creative thinking and to produce life-long learners. The thing that made this gig so different from all others was that I was invited to be an audience of one to view what the students had done from my books (most of them now out of print). They were not hiring me for my performance.

The first graders did the activities from Gobs of Goo. They made glue and mayonnaise and bubbles, among other icky things. The second graders did Lots of Rot. One boy wrote: “A grape grows gray mold. An onion grows black mold. Cake grows rhizopus mold. Cheese grows blue mold. Meat grows green mold. They all smell awful!” The third graders made paper and string from Fuzz Does It! and put on a science fair. The fourth graders did a magic show from Magic…..Naturally!, which they performed for all the other students during the day as I watched and applauded. And the fifth graders did tricks from Bet You Can’t and Bet You Can! with much verve and enthusiasm. (These tricks live on in my new book We Dare You!)

As I walked through that beautiful library and hallways festooned with displays of all the work the kids had done from my books, I was deeply touched and honored. What a validation of my work! This was my dream fulfilled! How do I remember it so well? The school produced a book for me entitled, “Getting Ready for Vicki Cobb.” It’s in my lap right now as I write this.

But the biggest bonus was the surprise lesson the teachers learned from this venture: They had never gotten so much writing out of the kids as they did when they had to write up their science projects! Think about it. Writers, even kids, have two problems. The first is having something to say. The second is finding a way to say it. Obviously you can’t do the second without the first. A science activity is a specific, finite act with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Students can use the way it is written in the book as a model. But they can also put their own spin on it because they have actually experienced the activity. The Cummings faculty decided that they would routinely incorporate hands-on science activities in writing lessons in the future. Can you understand my frustration with schools that say they don’t have time to teach science because they’re too busy teaching reading and writing?

Those kids are all grown up now. I’ll bet they read and write and think quite well.

The I.N.K. bloggers, past and present, are pleased to announce the launch of our new website: INK Think Tank: Nonfiction Authors in Your Classroom. The main feature of this website is a FREE, searchable database of hundreds of in-print books all written by the 22 award-winning I.N.K. authors. Now you can find lists of books for all grade levels covering content mandated by National Education Standards and your state curriculum. Instead of feeding kids material from bland, uninteresting books, we offer a cornucopia of delicious, appetizing titles guaranteed to nourish both reading and learning. No single book can be all things to all students, but the LISTS of books generated by our database will come close. We believe that if kids learn through these high-interest, well-researched books that have been vetted for accuracy, they will perform better on the required assessment tests. We have included, on our new website, a page of references and studies that support our position. Now you can have fun playing with our database. For teachers, it’s designed to give you peace-of-mind that you’re fulfilling the requirements of your school district while you’re rediscovering the joy of teaching. For parents and librarians, it will provide you with a quick reference to pull books from shelves that tie in with children’s interests and classroom content.
We built our database from the ground up. The books were analyzed for it by those who know them best, their authors. Like any new idea in today’s technological world, our database is still a work in progress. We expect it to grow and change, depending on feedback from you, our users. We will be adding books of new author/bloggers to give you increased breadth of subject areas. And, of course, we will be adding our new books as they are published. We want to know how you search so the database can be as user friendly as possible. There are links on our website for you to contact us with your suggestions. You can also email us at: [email protected]


In addition to our books, we authors are also an under-utilized resource for classrooms. So, through the Ink Think Tank website, we are making ourselves available to teachers. You can see our encapsulated author profiles on our INK Thinkers page. We are an amazing group! There is probably no corner of the globe that one of us hasn’t visited. Without exception, we are all life-long learners. We are not afraid to admit when we don’t know something. Indeed, not-knowing is a welcome opportunity to learn something new. Now we want to inject our enthusiasm for learning into your classroom. We have included our email addresses and links to our websites. Many of us are available for school visits and professional development. We will also answer questions related to our books. (BTW, the word “author” means “source.”)

This month our blogs will be devoted to creative ways our books can be used in classrooms. We want to excite you to the possibilities!

The internet has spawned behemoth websites that seem to require a Ph.D to navigate. There is so much information and so much choice! The INK Think Tank is a boutique. We’re small so the choice is not limitless. The selection is made for you. For many, that may come as a relief! On the other hand, as a group we are quite powerful. We are prepared to work as teams to help you and your district. We offer guidance and professional development unique to the worlds of both publishing and education. The launch of the INK Think Tank: Nonfiction Authors in Your Classroom website is just the beginning. Contact us. Let us help you empower your students so that they love to learn!

If you had to use one word to describe the traditional approach to writing about the real world it would be “authoritative.” Writing itself has authority. If “it is written” then it must be true. Authoritative language removes the narrator from the narration. Journalists are given style sheets to explicitly eliminate the human element from their reporting. They must write in the third person as the omniscient narrator. They must use formal language and distance themselves from the reader. They are NEVER to use the word “I” but if they have to refer to themselves, perhaps to insert an eyewitness tidbit, they must use the term “this reporter.” If an opinion is called for, they are to use the “editorial we” and not personalize themselves. The “editorial we” is particularly disingenuous, and runs counter to the veracity the author is trying to convey. Here’s what Mark Twain said about that term: Only kings, presidents, editors, and people with tapeworms have the right to use the editorial "we."

As every teacher knows, truth can be conveyed through humor, lyricism, passion, human experience, and one’s own quirky take on the facts. It doesn’t have to be told in dry, unvarnished terms to be credible. The accuracy of factual information has nothing to do with an authoritative delivery. In fact, when a teacher humanizes content with his or her personal spin, the lesson resonates more profoundly with students. At their best, such lessons can be inspiring. In fiction, it is the storyteller’s voice that makes a novel memorable. But it has taken a long time for this concept to filter down to us nonfiction authors. Voice matters. When I found mine, I had to fight for it.

In 1980 I was commissioned to write a book about microbiology for kids but on a macro level. The illustrations were not going to show what you might actually see under a microscope. There was no budget for micrographs. (In those days, publishers skimped on the art for nonfiction. My book was illustrated in two colors and black to save money.) The book was titled Lots of Rot. The lead sentences were: “Want to smell something rotten? Take a deep breath by a garbage can.” The editor sent the manuscript back with the lead sentences rewritten: “Have you ever smelled something rotten? You probably have if you’ve ever taken a deep breath by a garbage can.” Every active verb in the book had been changed to passive voice. Everything that was playful and engaging had been reworded to distance me from the reader and formalize the text. I was told that the first sentence was a sentence fragment and that wouldn’t do for teaching proper English. As I read through the editorial comments I felt as if I had been punched in the stomach. I made an appointment to fight for my book. I bought a new suit, wrote up a brief “In Defense of Lots of Rot,” said my prayers and, with my head high, met with my publisher and editor and made my case. I lost. Three days later they called my agent and said, “If Vicki won’t write the book the way we want it, we won’t publish it.”

Even though I needed the money, I told my agent to pull the book. It was later published as I had written it. Then came the test. I was sitting at my new publisher’s booth at a convention with Lots of Rot on display, hot off the press. A young girl walked by and picked up the book, and started reading. White knuckled, I watched and wondered will she turn the page? She did. Then she turned the next page and settled her chin in her hand to read. Her mother said it was time to go. “Wait,” she said. “I want to finish this.” Validation! My resolve is now steel.

One would think after all these years that my battles would be over. But I still run into editors who don’t “get it” when it comes to “voice” in nonfiction. I still find myself, as Desi Arnaz would say, “splainin’” why I write the way I write. I’m a playful person, still a kid at heart. I have a good sense of humor. I care deeply about my subject matter. I bring these qualities to my writing. In this day and age of too much information, “the facts and nothing but the facts” doesn’t cut it. Only the revealed humanity of an author’s voice creates literature and achieves meaningful and authentic communication with readers. To stifle it with old-fashioned notions about being authoritative and adhering to tradition is counterproductive to both reading and learning. When speaking to children, person to person, an author's voice recognizes and honors their humanity. They get it; connections are made. And that, in my opinion, is the truth.

Vicki Cobb is speaking on Tuesday at the University of Kentucky School of Education. Her topic is "Science That's Fun to Read and Teach." Her audience is elemmentary education students as well as interested faculty and area teachers and librarians.



Rosalyn Schanzer will be talking about her book WHAT DARWIN SAW; THE JOURNEY THAT CHANGED THE WORLD at George Mason University’s enormous Fall for the Book festival in the Greater Washington D.C. area. It’s free and open to the public. Here’s the schedule and site information about her presentation:

What Darwin Saw: The Journey That Changed the World
Sunday, September 20 from 2 to 3 P.M.
Prince George’s Memorial Library
Hyattsville Branch
6530 Adelphi Rd.
Hyattsville, MD 20782
301-985-4690

You can find out more about the author by clicking here:
http://www.fallforthebook.org/participants-detail.php?participant_id=53
You can find out all about the book festival and see the entire speakers’ list by clicking here: http://www.fallforthebook.org/




From Barbara Kerley: I'll be co-teaching (with Highlights Sr. Editor Kim T. Griswell) a class in writing narrative nonfiction as part of the Highlights Foundation Founders Workshop Series. The class runs from Nov. 5 - 8. For more information, go to http://www.highlightsfoundation.org/pages/current/FWsched_nonfictionStorytelling.html




From Deborah Heiligman: Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith has been named to:Booklist's Top 10 Romances for Youth and Booklist's Top 10 Biographies for Youth



Melissa Stewart will be speaking at the New England Reading Association Conference in Warwick, RI, on September 25 and the New England Environmental Education Association Conference in Ivoryton, CT on September 27.





Booklist Webinar: The Scoop on Series Nonfiction: Best Uses, Best Practices, and Best New Books for Fall
September 22, 3PM-4pm cST
Need help engaging reluctant readers, promoting reading success, and keeping your library relevant in this era of accountability? Attend "The Scoop on Series Nonfiction" Webinar and come away with a wealth of information and ideas for enhancing your collection and engaging young readers with series nonfiction. Booklist youth editors will moderate as four top series nonfiction publishers—Lerner Publications, ABDO Publishing Company, Norwood House Press, and Cherry Lake Publishing—share their expertise and introduce a selection of their fall titles. Webinar participants will also get a sneak peek at Booklist's October 1 Series Nonfiction Spotlight, including a focus on a new trend: series nonfiction and early literacy. Reserve your seat today!

I met Kathy Darling at a local writers group back in 1979. She had been an editor for Gerrard Publishing and said she knew my books. She was a heavy-set woman with a loud voice and a raucous, cackling laugh. She suggested that we work together right from the day we met. She wanted to do a book of “bar bets” for kids. I said I would only if it were slanted toward science. She agreed. I said that since my reputation in the science book arena was more central to me than to her, I had to be first author. Again she agreed, cheerfully. With that out of the way, we began work on the book that became Bet You Can’t! Science Impossibilities to Fool You.

Kathy was bossy, argumentative and sometimes exaggerated facts to make a story better. I had a more comprehensive grasp of the science principles involved. She was a tireless researcher who seemed to enjoy the search for new material much more than I did. We made trips to libraries and leafed through piles of old science teacher magazines, popular science magazines, magazines for magicians. We prowled through novelty shops, toy stores, and second-hand book stores looking for ideas; there was no internet in those days. After we had collected a bunch of possibilities, I went to Kathy’s house to try stuff out. She had two Irish wolfhounds whose noses were always at crotch level. Somehow we got the book written. I found the whole experience difficult, to say the least.

Much to my surprise, Bet You Can’t! won the Science Book Award from the New York Academy of Sciences. And it sold like crazy! I didn’t think that the tricks were all that unusual but the writing was superior. Somehow our collaborative writing style had a higher octane level than anything either of us could produce on our own.

Since we couldn’t argue with success, we decided to write Bet You Can! “But this time let’s work at my house,” I said, “Your house smells like a kennel.” Again she agreed, quickly. So we went back to arguing, experimenting, and writing. I often found myself raising my voice and strenuously quarreling when I thought she was wrong. Kathy’s first job had been answering questions for the Encyclopedia Britannica that the encyclopedia didn’t answer. She really believed that she knew EVERYTHING. What a pain! In spite of all the laughter, and there was a lot of that, I found her irritating. Again, I did not enjoy the experience.

Then I did some work on myself. I dabbled in some of the workshops of the human potential movement. I took myself to task in a number of areas of my life. When Kathy and I came together to write our third book Wanna Bet! she hadn’t changed. She was still insistent, contentious, curious, enthusiastic and hilarious. But for some strange reason I no longer found her irritating. When we finished the book I felt sorry that it was done. Again we had produced something neither of us could do alone but this time the process was FUN! We wrote two more books after that, Don’t Try This at Home and You Gotta Try This! Thoroughly enjoyable, each time. Here’s a typical email from her:

I found an interesting body "trick." Where does the sound come from when you snap your fingers? Believe it or not, it is mostly from the sound coming from your palm. If you cover the palm with a tissue or a sound absorbing cloth you will hear only a very faint version of the snap.

For years she tried to figure out how to tattoo a hardboiled egg through its shell, leaving no marks on the shell, without success. That became our in-joke.

Our latest book is We Dare You!; a wonderfully successful bind-up of our five books; made possible after twenty-five years because, finally, all five books were out of print. (It is being released in paperback this month.) Unfortunately, when the project was about to start, Kathy was diagnosed with a particularly aggressive cancer. I asked her if she wanted to participate in putting the new book together (there was a lot of new material to add). But she bowed out. Whenever I called her to ask how she was, she cheerfully responded, “Still on the right side of the grass!” I did the revisions alone. It wasn’t the same.

Kathy died early this summer. I learned a lot from her. It was a lesson about love.

Jean Reynolds is a veteran children’s nonfiction editor. She founded Millbrook Press and was its publisher for 15 years. It was sold to Lerner in 2006. She has also been Chair of the Children’s Book Council and served on the Board of Governors of Higher Education in Connecticut.

On June 10, she gave us a summary of the history of children's nonfiction as she experienced it. Today is her eagerly awaited vision of its future.

*****************

As the 1980’s merged into the 90’s, a number of things that had been brewing for a decade began to come to fruition. First of all children’s books became important in the context of the publishing world. The trade bookstore had rediscovered their potential and suddenly there was big business to be had. Picture books that had been around for years suddenly had new lives and their publishers (and a number of very fortunate authors and artists) made small fortunes on book sales as well as merchandise and media deals. At the same time the library market began to change. School librarians were victims of budget cuts and we no longer had the highly knowledgeable buyer that automatically made a good book a saleable book. Purchasing decisions were centralized, and non-fiction publishers poured into the industry offering massive series of standardized books designed to appeal to the administrator more than to the child or the librarian. This situation was great for fiction, but not so great for informational books whose discovery by the trade bookstore was slower in coming.

The other happening was one that especially affected informational books. The internet became a tool for student research. It gradually became the place of choice for finding out the population of Utah or the life span of a cheetah. Librarians were capable of leading kids on a tour of cyberspace where information abounded. This was major. Pundits began predicting the demise of the informational book, indeed of all books!

When I began in this business, the filmstrip was to have been the demise of the book. The next threat was television, and then microfiche and I think there have been a few others over the years. The only thing they had in common was that they were all wrong. I don’t think the internet represents a threat to good informational books but rather offers an opportunity for the best books to once again rise to the top. The formulaic books that present the straight facts are indeed threatened, and will no doubt go the way of the print encyclopedias. A lot of factual information benefits from being up-to-date, and unfortunately the information in a book is frozen in time on the day the manufacturing department tells the editor “no more changes.” That can be several months before a book is even published. But as the straight factual books recede, there will be more room and more recognition in the marketplace for books that synthesize information in a way that the internet cannot.

Authors who present a point of view, who write with a voice, who use their skills to breathe life into their subject matter, who understand what children really want to know about a topic are about to get a clearer field. Smart publishers are seeing that the days of the formulaic book are numbered and seem more open to creative proposals. For example, I recently worked with Lerner’s young adult line, Twenty-First Century Books, on a series by Cathy Gourley called Images and Issues of Women in the 20th Century, analyzing the way media portrayed women, and how women perceived themselves in the twentieth century. Five volumes of entertaining and fascinating material brought together advertising, government agendas, women’s rights, radio/TV portrayals, social progress, and biography all blended into a decade-by decade-history. Not exactly internet fare!

And speaking of biography – a good biography is no longer “just a biography.” You have Jan Greenburg and Sandra Jordan’s Christo and Jeanne-Claude to attest to that. Or look at Bob Racaka’s picture book The Vermeer Interviews. These books are so exciting and the usual information is worked in so cleverly that we’re reading a story, not a biography.

I’m already seeing some of the things that happened in fiction just beginning to happen in informational books. I’ve talked with authors whose rights have reverted and who have been able to repackage some highly creative materials and bring them back to life. We now have prizes that recognize achievement in the field. Bookstores are actually purchasing informational books – perhaps not in the quantities of the latest picture book, but that can come. And, of course, good blogs like this one abound.

Books that delight as well as inform are becoming ever more important – and their authors and artists are going to live happily ever after.

April Pulley Sayre’s blog on May 28, “Nonfiction and Hands-On Science,” inspired me to continue the conversation:

The word “author” means “source.” Part of the job of an author is to be able to defend one’s work. So if someone asks, “How do you know?,” an author should have an answer. For writings in history or language arts, for example, often how we know is that we read it somewhere. So authors in scholarly disciplines cite the works of others to lend credence to their own work. Most people are not studious enough to follow a chain of footnotes in a history text back to an eyewitness account, which may not be all that accurate in the first place. And, as nonfiction authors for children, we all know that there is nothing like first-hand experience to enliven our texts and add credibility to our voices. But for science, “hands-on” means something more.

“How do you know?” is a question that every scientist can answer by saying, “Don’t take my word for it. This is what I did. If you do what I did, then you’ll know what I know.” In other words, scientists must be able to provide procedures so that others can replicate the behavior that produced their results, or not. When I wrote the Marie Curie biography, I was fascinated to learn how the scientists of that day eagerly performed each others experiments, gaining new insights into phenomena about the structure of the atom from their varied perspectives, deepening and enriching their collective knowledge. Science advances because of a community of shared experiences. Everyone who is interested can see for themselves. The knowledge accumulated this way is not merely a collection of anecdotes or hearsay, but an overwhelming body of first-hand evidence.

How we know, in science, is central to what we know. Hands-on experience in observing nature and doing experiments teaches kids how to do science, just as giving kids art supplies lets them be artists. You cannot truly understand science unless you know how it works. Last week I watched a History Channel program called “The Link” about finding a 47 million-year-old fossil that may be a transitional specie between the primates that became modern lemurs and the primates that became apes and humans. The program recounted the various ways scientists from several disciplines studied the fossil and come to their conclusions about its life and death. It ended with the famed Dr. Leakey saying that he didn’t “believe” in evolution because evolution is like gravity. It is an indisputable fact, not something that may or may not exist so that you can choose whether or not to believe in it. When you see the nitty-gritty of how scientists studied this fossil, there is no way to make sense out of it without the fact of evolution.

The biggest problem I have with some hands-on science activities is that there is little or no connection between an activity and the questions it illuminates, or even why you’d want to know about it in the first place. So many science activity books just gratuitously give directions for things to do without giving the reader any reason to do them. That kind of “hands-on” is only fun if you’re making an explosion or a volcano. That’s why I write with hands-on activities in context. A good example is in I Face the Wind. Catching air in a plastic bag is a “So what!” unless the reader gets that this proves that air is “real stuff” even if you can’t see it, smell it or taste it, and you can only feel it when it moves or when it is trapped in a plastic bag and you can push against it. Even the most mundane activity takes on import and drama when presented in a context that makes the outcome of an activity significant.

So it is our job as authors who write hands-on activities to create the context through language that makes these experiences meaningful for our readers. This is where our individual passions and enthusiasms shine through and make our writing distinctive.

Some of the most poorly written and boring informational writing gets millions of readers. I’m talking about the legends and labels that explain exhibits in museums, zoos and aquariums. Even as a child, as I read the facts on the small square above the lion’s cage in the Central Park Zoo—the Latin name, where it came from, and what it ate--I felt unsatisfied. I wondered about its behavior, which was usually sleeping in a cell of a cage that contained only a piece of a log as its minimal furnishing. I wondered how the lion really lived in the wild. Museums and zoos have improved over the years but the writing (usually done by museum staff) still leaves a lot to be desired.

So it’s no surprise that I have long harbored a secret wish to write a museum.I’m getting my wish! Well, I’m not exactly writing a museum, I’m writing a single exhibit. But, hey! It’s a start! A fabulous curved mirror, originally designed to produce a 3-D optical display for a flight simulator, has been donated to my new local library in Greenburgh, NY. It will go on display in about two weeks. In my enthusiasm for this project, I’m sharing with you the writing hoping it will generate some interest so you’ll want to see such a mirror in the future (there aren’t many of them around.)


















The Story of this “Boomer” Mirror


It’s not easy to refuel an aircraft while it’s traveling at 500 mph six miles above the earth’s surface. Boeing developed the “Flying Boom,” a flexible, semi-rigid tube, to deliver fuel from a tanker plane to another aircraft while both are traveling at high speeds, six miles plus above the earth’s surface. The boom operator must be able to make many tiny adjustments in positioning the boom nozzle to dock with the very small receptacle on the receiving plane. Needless to say, this skill requires great hand-eye coordination, acute depth perception, and a considerable amount of practice.