If you scroll on down to last Thursday’s blog, you’ll find Steve Jenkins’ lively rant about the pseudo-scientific gibberish and censorship surrounding the Theory of Evolution. Since 5 (yes, five!!!) of our INK bloggers have written books about Charles Darwin, and since I’m one of the perps my own self, I cannot help but chime in.
Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is overwhelming. Now that DNA has vindicated just about everything Darwin ever wrote, evolution is a proven fact—you can take that message straight to the bank. And as the unifying underlying principle of all biology, evolution should be taught in schools just as surely as we teach kids about gravity or the fact that the earth revolves around the sun (another maligned “theory” that got a scientist in trouble).
To put it very simply, Darwin showed us how all living things are shaped over time by Natural Selection; if any random change in a plant or animal made it more likely to survive in a given environment, its offspring might end up with the same trait and would therefore be more likely to survive too. And any plants or animals that randomly developed unhelpful traits would be likely to die out.
For example, Darwin discovered that the most spectacular birds of paradise and the most colorful butterflies were likely to lure the best mates and therefore have the most offspring. He saw how pumas that ran too slowly couldn’t catch enough game to eat, while their faster, stronger brothers would capture the most prey and live to reproduce in the bargain. He noted that mammals like bats which had gradually developed wings over a long period of time could catch prey—and escape from predators—better than their wingless ancestors. And anteaters with the longest snouts could reach deeper into an anthill to eat the most ants. And the strongest alligators or rams or stag beetles could win a battle for the best mates and pass their great strength along to their children too. And certain drought-resistant plants would survive to reproduce when the rains disappeared. And so on.
The world continues to evolve right before our eyes every single day. Are there any examples kids can see today? I’m sure that the young contestants Steve blogged about who are writing and drawing their thoughts on evolution have thought of plenty. I've been gleaning a few more:
Hi kids. Did you ever have a horrible earache, but when the doctor gave you an antibiotic, it didn’t work? Whoops. That’s because the kind of bacteria that caused your pain has evolved; back when your medicine was first invented, it used to kill almost every trace of bacteria and kids got well again right away. But a tiny number of bacterium were resistant to the drug and refused to drop dead. They multiplied over and over instead, and by now, millions of their evil offspring aren’t affected by the medicine one bit. And guess what? The ten most dangerous microbes on the planet are now resistant to everything we can throw in their direction. Watch your head.
Hi kids. Did you happen to watch yesterday’s TV show about African elephants, and did you notice their teeny little tusks? Well guess what. Male elephants used to have gigantic tusks so that they could fight each other to win the best looking girlfriend. But poachers killed all the elephants with the biggest tusks and made a bundle selling the ivory. The only elephants that survived to breed had teeny little tusks. They had evolved.
Hi again. Remember how global warming has been killing off our coral reefs and all of the astonishing undersea creatures that live there? Well guess what. There’s actually a small glimmer of hope because some scientists have figured out that certain reefs in the Western Pacific Ocean and near Australia evolved in
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By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 12/6/2010
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: finding the truth, teaching, nature, science, Steve Jenkins, Rosalyn Schanzer, Add a tag
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 11/1/2010
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Rosalyn Schanzer, Add a tag
Back in the spring and summer of 2009 I wrote a two-part blog entitled The Law of Unintended Consequences. Part One dug up some famous old kiddy-lit that distorted the truth or lied outright in an ironic effort to foist high moral values upon the youth of America. And Part Two explained how a valiant stab at fostering racial and gender equality resulted in lots of children's books that turned everyone into model citizens—everyone, that is, except for white males. Well, The Law of Unintended Consequences strikes again. Or does it? Maybe we can overcome a negative consequence if we keep our eyes open.
So what hath America wrought this time around? Here comes Part Three.
First—the back-story: In the year 2000, the 30 industrialized countries who run the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) decided to administer a series of tests in reading, math, and science designed to rank student academic achievement around the world. Called PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) it’s administered to 15-year-old students every three years and it’s supposed to determine how well the students from 57 different countries can apply their knowledge of reading, math, and science to real-life situations. Though all three subjects are covered, a different discipline is featured in depth each time the test is given.
Approximately 400,000 students from 30 member countries and 27 partner countries took the two hour science-oriented test in 2006, including 5,600 students from the United States. The results were absolutely devastating for our students; they ranked 22nd in the world in science. In math they performed even worse, landing in 27th place. There was a reading portion too, but scores for U.S. students were tossed out because the tests had been printed incorrectly.
Our panicked educators, politicians, and lawmakers rightfully feared that we could no longer compete with the rest of the world in the global economy or educate the doctors, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers of the future unless we raised the bar of American education. So off they went, setting out on a well-intentioned quest to raise student test scores.
But what has been the unintended consequence? There are still some outstanding schools in America, but in this very short time and in far too many places, teachers are being required to drum rote facts and rote facts alone into their student’s pointy little heads. Just the facts, Ma’am...teach to the tests! Often there’s little or no time or stimulus money left to foster creative thinking, interdisciplinary studies, or solid skills in art, music, or dance. Libraries with their delicious trove of books are being sliced out of the budget and some very boring, disjointed, inaccurate online textbooks are rapidly taking their place. Time for free play during recess and for physical education are being reduced. How can kids learn by sitting still for hours on end and memorizing lists of facts on a computer? And how much fun can it be for a good creative teacher to be tied so tightl
By: Linda Salzman,
on 11/1/2010
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Susan E. Goodman, Vicki Cobb, Gretchen Woelfle, Loreen Leedy, Rosalyn Schanzer, Add a tag
Susan Goodman is delighted that her book, The First Step, is going to be published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and will be illustrated by E.B. Lewis.
Loreen Leedy will participate in a panel discussion and reception on Friday, December 3 from 5:00 pm to 8:00 pm at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale for the exhibit The Storymaker's Art. Work from eight Florida illustrators will be included in the show. http://www.thestorymakersart.com/
Gretchen Woelfle will be traveling with novelist Carolyn Marsden to West Africa (via Paris!) to give author talks at international schools in Bamako, Mali; Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso; and Dakar, Senegal. Watch for a full report in December.
Vicki Cobb and Rosalyn Schanzer will be presenting jointly at the Science Teachers Association of Ontario (STAO) conference at 11/11 11 am via videoconferencing. Vicki also has an article in the November Booklistonline Quick Tips called "Nonfiction Books and the Joy of Learning" where she promotes our blog.
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 10/4/2010
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: teaching, nonfiction, Rosalyn Schanzer, reading, history, Add a tag
OMG. I turned on my car radio the other day and wafting in through the ether was an NPR panel discussing the importance of reading first-rate literature in school classrooms. So that’s a good thing, right? But as usual, every single book the group mentioned was fiction. C’mon, radio people. And it gets worse; the panelists all agreed that nonfiction was totally boring! To add insult to injury, one guy said there was no such thing as Nonfiction that’s also Literature. Then he defined nonfiction as Original Source Material that kids hate because it all consists of formal documents and speeches written in an arcane style nobody can understand. (Think Gettysburg Address or the Bill of Rights, said he).
Gimme a break, sports fans. You and I could blog all day long about great literature that just so happens to be nonfiction. There’s a reason that the majority of books sold to American adults are nonfiction; the subject matter is fascinating and the quality of the writing can be absolutely superb. And guess what? The exact same standards hold true for the best children's nonfiction books these days too….and they’re related to the kids’ curriculum to boot. Besides, original source material (all those diaries, journals, private letters, songs, articles, speeches, sketches, and artifacts that were created by people who were on the scene at a given time and place) is fabulous stuff.
So let’s meld some very cool original source material with nonfiction stories kids might like to read. Here are a few surprising examples I’ve tied into the stories in my own books—you could never make this stuff up and every good nonfiction author has plenty more.
EXAMPLE 1) Quotes from people who went to the California Gold Rush:
MAN TRAVELING TO THE GOLDFIELDS BY SHIP: “The water is becoming bad. I don’t mind it much. I have a way of killing the bugs before drinking them.”
MAN TRAVELING BY LAND: “Hail exceeded anything I ever saw, being as large as pigeon’s eggs. Found our cookstove full of water. There may be fun in camping, but we haven’t discovered any.”
IN NEWSPAPER ARTICLE ABOUT THE GOLDFIELDS: “Chickens were persistent gatherers of small nuggets of gold, and their gizzards were regularly searched by the cooks who prepared them for the oven. At Diamond Springs one was killed for Sunday dinner whose gizzard panned out at $12.80.”
EXAMPLE 2) Comments from the journals of Lewis and Clark as they crossed the West:
“The mercury this morning stood at 40 degrees below 0. An Indian man came in who had stayed out all night without fire, and very thinly clothed. This man was not the least injured. Those people bear more cold than I thought possible.” “This evening Sacagawea was delivered of a fine boy. This was her first child and Mr. Jessaume informed me that a small portion of the rattle of a rattlesnake had never failed to hasten the birth of a child. Having such a rattle, I gave it to him. He administered two rings broken in small pieces and added to water. Whether this was the cause or not, she had not taken it ten minutes before the baby was born.”
EXAMPLE 3) Two quotes that help uncover both sides’ points of view during the American Revolution.
PATRICK HENRY, furious that En
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 9/6/2010
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Rosalyn Schanzer, history, teaching, Writing, Add a tag
Greetings, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome back to I.N.K.! Here’s hoping that the sundry teachers, kids, and kids’ families amongst you had some fun in the sun and have your new back-to-school outfits at the ready. I imagine that as usual, you’ve come up with one version or another of “What I did on My Summer Vacation,” so with that in mind, I thought I’d tell you a true story about telling true stories.
Once upon a time when I was a brand new freshman in college, I bought about a ton of required textbooks and trudged off to my first class with the heaviest book of all in tow—an ugly foreboding colorless behemoth with tiny type that included everything but the kitchen sink about the History of Western Civilization.
The class was not an elective, the auditorium was as noisy as an an echo-chamber, and there must have been 200 students perched on the screechy folding chairs. Finally, in walked a little old white-haired lady. We could barely see her face peering over the top of the podium, and I’m sure all 200 students were groaning inside. Until she began to speak.
As it turns out, this wasn’t just any dried up dull-as-dishwater little old lady. This professor was spellbinding. She really was. A magician with words, she told us lively tales about her adventures at archeological digs in Crete, and we rode her magic carpet to deepest Africa, where she had unearthed an ancient human femur or two and helped (slowly but dramatically) to uncover some mysteries about our past.
Leaving no other stone unturned either, she revealed plenty of juicy, gossipy stories about the sex scandals and treachery surrounding all those famous people we were required to study. She got us all riled up about history and the unforgettable dramas it can brew. She made us howl with laughter. She made us think. We couldn’t wait to go to class--and we hardly ever had to open that heavy but comparatively useless textbook. In the end, everyone got good grades in her class simply because we remembered with great clarity every single tale she had to unfold. It was her great stories that held us in thrall, and not one of them came from a textbook.
But this story isn’t over. I returned for my sophomore year excited about my history class and all psyched to hear a great story or three. The feeling didn’t last, though, not even for a minute. This time, our teacher was a bored and boring grad student who had no use for undergraduates and no apparent passion about history either. The very first thing she did when we walked into the room was to call the roll, which took about 15 minutes. Then she told us to be quiet. Then she wrote down an outline on the blackboard (which was far, far away). It said something like this:
I. PELOPONNESIAN WAR
A. 431-404 B.C.
Phase 1- Archidamian War
Etc. etc. etc.
Then she gave us a long list of terms to memorize, told us to read the textbook during the remainder of the class, said there would be a quiz on the material next time, and informed us that we could write only with a pen. My mid-term grade in that class was a C, the only one I ever got in college. The grad student/teacher wrote on my first test that this was college, that C’s were unacceptable, and that I was obviously never going to be a history student.
I still think about my inspirational first teacher every time I write another book about history. By following her example and using my storyteller voice, I aim to put flesh on the bare bones of history and bring its people to life. And I
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 5/31/2010
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: history, Charles Darwin, Rosalyn Schanzer, American Revolultion, Lewis and Clark, Add a tag
My husband and I spent the last few days up in New England, where I was doing research for my new book. It begins with the terrifying tale of a malevolent stowaway at sea, and as we traveled up the Atlantic coast, I seemed to be reminded of the world’s waterways over and over again.
First we were joined by our daring friend, world-famous sailor, and educator par excellence Rich Wilson, who’s getting up-to-speed for his second nonstop single-handed sailboat race all the way around the world. Then we were wowed by a dramatic museum exhibit called The Fiery Pool, which was a name the ancient Mayans used to describe the sea whenever their Sun God rose in the east and whenever it set into its own watery underworld in the west. (They also imagined that the Yucatan Peninsula floated atop a gigantic sea turtle.) I had just seen a new book about the enormous sea of plastic debris that's currently wreaking havoc in a large part of the Pacific Ocean. And all day long every single day, we were blasted by news about the heartbreaking blowout disaster that’s flooding our beloved Gulf of Mexico with oil.
I must have had water on the brain this weekend, because I was stunned to realize what an enormous role our waterways have played in all of my books about history. So I'm blown away when I consider how much these waters have changed from those times until today.
Take the time of Charles Darwin, for example. I've written that he discovered great masses of colorful, amazingly varied animals at sea, found fish fossils high atop mountains that had once lain beneath the ocean, and figured out that coral reefs were built by millions upon millions of delicate coral animals whose rocky ocean homes fringed the bases of volcanic mountains—mountains that had erupted at sea and had then worn away over millions and millions of years.
I've also said that it was Benjamin Franklin who charted the Gulf Stream by taking its temperature so that sailors could travel along this fast, warm “river in the ocean” between Europe and America in a shorter time than ever before. And when Captain John Smith made his wonderfully accurate maps of the Chesapeake Bay and New England, he was so amazed by the bounty of their waterways that he spent the rest of his life writing books to extol America’s natural riches.
During the Revolutionary War, George Rodgers Clark led 170 men on an 18-day march through a flooded river of icy water up to their necks to capture a British fort in Indian country.
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And Captain John Paul Jones refused to give up his flaming merchant ship, Bonhomme Richard, to the British when he cried “I have not yet begun to fight” and went on to defeat the great new British warship Serapis.
Lewis and Clark opened the west by traveling upriver, commonly reaching spots boiling with fish so numerous that the explorers caught as many as 700 enormous specimens in a single afternoon.
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By: Lizzy Burns,
on 5/28/2010
Blog: A Chair, A Fireplace and A Tea Cozy (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: National Geographic, rosalyn schanzer, thomas b allen, reviews, The Edge of the Forest, Add a tag
Reviews that originally appeared in the 
April 2006 issue of the now-gone The Edge of the Forest.
George vs. George: The American Revolution As Seen from Both Sides
By Rosalyn Schanzer
Publisher: National Geographic Children's Books (October 1, 2004)
ISBN: 0792273494
George Washington, Spymaster: How the Americans Outspied the British and Won the Revolutionary War
By Thomas B. Allen
Publisher: National Geographic Children's Books (January 1, 2004)
ISBN: 0792251261
Originally appeared at The Edge of the Forest.
The American Revolution is brought to life in two books that use a similar device. On the surface, both George v. George and George Washington, Spymaster are about George Washington; but both are about more than the man.
George v. George compares the two most visible people on each side of the war, both named George: the American George Washington and the English King George III. Schanzer initially focuses on these two individuals, but then expands to compare the American and British views on everything from politics to methods of war. The approach results in a balanced view of the American Revolution, explaining such things as the structure of Colonial government and taxation. Particularly impressive to this American is how Schanzer conveys how the British viewed the American guerilla warfare as dishonorable.
In any conflict, there are two sides to a story. Books that show historical events from one side, painting the other as "them" and "wrong," can lead a child to wonder at how stupid those "others" were to not agree with "us." Schanzer, by providing balance in the arguments, is not looking to persuade the reader to agree with either George; rather, by providing the point of view of the "other," she allows the reader to see the war from a different point of view. This is about understanding another's position.
The color illustrations are reminiscent of 18th century political cartoons; so while original to the text, they convey a time period appropriate feel. At the same time, there is a modern, kid-friendly feel.
As the title indicates, George Washington, Spymaster, uses George Washington to highlight the value of information in war. This isn't a book about the life of George
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 3/1/2010
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Vicki Cobb, Rosalyn Schanzer, INK Think Tank, INK database, Add a tag
Last week, my fellow I.N.K. blogger Vicki Cobb and I tried out something new—at least, it was new for me. We walked over to our very own computers in our very own home offices and put on a live joint videoconference with a group of curriculum specialists, media specialists, and techies down in Allendale, South Carolina.
Vicki lives in New York where it was about to snow. I live in Virginia where the side roads were still impassable from our own monster blizzard. But all the little video interconnections and sample slide shows and cameras and sound systems and live shots of the participants worked just fine—and we never even had to leave home. Besides that, the audience members could ask questions and make comments as though they were sitting next to us in the same room. It was all very laid back and friendly, and the audience was terrific too. (Fortunately, they couldn’t see our shoes.) How cool is that?
Our specific goal was to do what we often do for teachers when we go far far away from home; present a sampling of great ways to get kids so excited about learning that they can’t wait to come to class. Vicki introduced some amazing hands-on science experiments kids can try out in class using everyday items (think plastic bags, paper cups, and toilet paper)! I introduced some wild factoids about famous people from history that can wake up any kid, and I also revealed a few secret tricks teachers can use to help themselves become amazing storytellers—and nonfiction storytellers at that.
Our more general goal was to do a test run on an upcoming offering from INK THINK TANK called INK LINK: Authors on Call. Even though we won’t be hanging out our shingle until mid-April, we were very excited about this trial run. We’re hoping to bring high quality award-winning non-fiction into the classroom. Seems like most schools feature fiction instead! If you’re reading this blog, well, you are probably already a kindred spirit.
Videoconferencing is an exciting technology, I think. I shall now put my hand over my heart and announce that if we can get this project on just the right track, we’ll be able to let groups enter a “virtual classroom” with one or more of our Authors on Call, who will share their experiences, wisdom, and insights, enhanced by a colorful array of slides and other visuals.
Besides that, audience members will be able to make comments or ask questions to some truly inspiring and informative nonfiction authors. And our videoconferencing packages will offer in-services, panel discussions and much more to teachers and other professionals. We’d also like to provide virtual assembly programs for children at a fraction of the cost of an actual school visit. That way, people of every age will have a chance to see, hear, question and interact with well-known authors from afar, as if they were sitting together right in the same room the way we did last week. So far the future is looking very interesting...here's hoping we're ready to come out dancing!
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By: Linda Salzman,
on 12/7/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: book recommendations, Susan E. Goodman, Vicki Cobb, Gretchen Woelfle, David Schwartz, Tanya Lee Stone, Anna M. Lewis, Susanna Reich, Deborah Heiligman, Rosalyn Schanzer, Marfe Ferguson Delano, Add a tag
Congratulations to our bloggers Deborah Heiligman(Charles and Emma: The Darwins' Leap of Faith) and Steve Jenkins (Down, Down, Down. A Journey to the Bottom of the Sea) for their selection as one of the eight titles chosen by the New York Times as the most Notable Children's Book of 2009!
Here are some recommendations for other excellent children's nonfiction. Tis the season to buy nonfiction!
From Marfe Ferguson Delano:
Fabulous Fishes, written and illustrated by Susan Stockdale. (2008, Peachtree Press, $15.95 hardcover) This charming picture book features simple rhyming text ("Shiny fish / spiny fish/ fish that hitch a ride") and bold, colorful pictures that introduce kids to all sorts of fishes. A spread at the back of the book gives more information about the fish included in the book.
Listen to the Wind: The Story of Dr. Greg & Three Cups of Tea, by Greg Mortenson and Susan L. Roth, illustrated by Susan L. Roth. (2009, Dial Books for Young Readers, $16.99) I enjoyed Mortenson's Three Cups of Tea, but I love the way Susan Roth retells this true story through the eyes of the Pakistani children. Her stunning paper-and-fabric collages take my breath away.
From Gretchen Woelfle:
Bad News for Outlaws: The Remarkable Life of Bass Reeves, Deputy U.S. Marshal sports the longest title and the most stunning cover I’ve seen this season. Gregory Christie’s monochromatic close-up headshot of Reeves is riveting. Christie continues with atmospheric endpapers and many full-page paintings which fit this monumental subject. Vaunda Micheaux Nelson’s colloquial text is also a perfect fit for a man who lived a most dramatic life. Slave, runaway slave, sharpshooter, and wily master of disguise, he became the first African American U.S. Deputy Marshal and served for thirty-two years. Nelson recounts several wily nonviolent captures by Reeves who brought more than 3000 outlaws, including his own son, to justice. The only quibble I have with this exciting story is the opening scene. Though Reeves killed only fourteen men out of 3000, Nelson opens with a thrilling but deadly confrontation with one of the fourteen victims. As an old peacenik, I would have preferred to see him outsmart rather than outshoot his man in the opening pages.
From Rosalyn Schanzer:
I first began my extensive collection of children’s books when I was a young illustrator and well before I began to write books on my own, so I used to select each book based solely upon the quality of the illustrations. One of my favorite early choices was the nonfiction book Ashanti to Zulu: African Traditions. This Caldecott Award Winner was fir
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 11/30/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Rosalyn Schanzer, Escaping to America, Add a tag
I admit it. I rudely interrupted my mom’s turkey dinner by being born on Thanksgiving during our family’s first ever Thanksgiving Goodstein Family Reunion. So many other babies followed this debut that our family has ballooned exponentially, and these days, between 90 and 130 Goodsteins from all over the world show up in one place every Thanksgiving to tell each other our best stories, take each other’s pictures, eat some food, preferably fattening, look at pictures of our own selves, eat again, play every conceivable kind of live music, perform bogus magic tricks in costume, eat dessert, and present plays and puppet shows and displays of acrobatic prowess. This is no great surprise, actually, considering that we’re descended from a long line of artists, musicians, actors, dancers, and shameless hams.
I’ve heard stories about our colorful family history all my life, but I’ve also read more amazing tales than you can shake a stick at because they’re written down in the Mischbucha Mirror. So what’s that (and how do you pronounce it anyway)? It’s a wonderful annual family newsletter that was first started by an 11 year old boy in 1981. Since everyone gets to send in his or her own contributions, it has gotten bigger and fancier and glossier and more colorful ever since. It’s handed out at each reunion in all its glory, and in its pages are a thousand tales. Here’s a tiny sampling. As the blogger, I get to start with my own part of the family:
One story told how my grandfather and a lot of other young men were abducted by the Cossack army during WW I, and they had to march on foot all the way from Poland to Manchuria eating only dry bread and sausages. My grandfather soon became a legend because he could ride on horseback at full speed while standing on his hands. The men had to ford all the rivers naked with their clothes and rifles on top of their heads and everyone got frostbite on their feet and their toenails fell off.
drawing and a note from my Polish grandmother
In a story about Ellis Island, a relative with a long unpronounceable name wanted to get a short new American name, but hadn’t decided what it was to be. So he wrote “to be” on the list, and that’s how his last name became “Tobe.”
A Holocaust survivor wrote a riveting description of her years in Auschwitz as a young teenager. She told how she considered the number on her arm to be not a mark of shame, but a badge of honor when she was one of the few prisoners to make it through the war alive.
One highly memorable cousin showed us photos of his ornate tattoos and explained how he was jailed as a teenager for painting graffiti on New York subway trains. He is now a glowing superstar/ fine artist whose one-man shows of graffiti art appear in the finest galleries in Europe.
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By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 11/2/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: school visits, Teaching Tips, Rosalyn Schanzer, How We Crossed the West, INK Think Tank, The Old Chisholm Trail, George vs. George, Add a tag
Somehow October’s chorus about using our books in the classroom didn’t come everyone's way on the guitar until November, so kindly bear with me for a minute while I wrap up my part of this song with one last verse.
I hated history when I was a kid. The way we were supposed to learn everything was by memorizing a bunch of boring names and dates and battle sites. To me, the people in history were a lot like George Washington on the dollar bill; old and green and wrinkled and dead.
What a waste! The real George Washington wasn’t anything like that portrait. Just between you and me, our boy George was a stud. He was so tall that most other men only came up to his shoulder. He was a great athlete and his hands and feet were enormous—what a basketball player he might have made! This terrific horseman, dancer, and card player was also so fearless in battle that even when his horses were shot out from under him and bullets ripped through his coat, he never left the front lines. You can’t make this stuff up; it’s all true, and if I had known things like that about the dead people in my history books, well of course I’d have wanted to hear more.
So how can teachers make history spring to life for kids? Here are three of the ways.
1) The Storyteller’s Voice- One of the main reasons that so many stories from history are still around is that they’re really the best stories of all time. I hated history because all those moons ago, my own teachers didn’t know how to tell a great tale. But if teachers can teach by using a storyteller’s voice, you can bet your boots that kids will beg to listen in. The best nonfiction books can show you the way and can add in fabulous pictures to boot. (And forgive me for mentioning that our INK THINK TANK has these books in spades.)
2) Tie-Ins- If you can get kids to relate directly to something in a book about history, you’ve got it made. Here are some examples from my book talks—no reason why with a little extra imagination teachers can’t do this kind of thing too. In one school, the students put on a wonderful play about Lewis and Clark based on my book How We Crossed the West and invited me to watch. When I visited their classrooms the next day, I surprised each actor and actress by telling them some incredibly happy and sad and funny things that happened to their own characters after the journey ended. This new information was a huge hit. When I presented the same book another time, we were able to bring a real Newfoundland dog (like Seaman, the one Meriwether Lewis brought on the journey) into the room. Bingo! I got to tell about all the funny and even life-saving adventures the dog had on the trip. Trust me—dogs are attention grabbers all the way. And during a previous Presidential election, an older group did a great job of comparing the gigantic role propaganda played in promoting George Washington vs. King George III back in Revolutionary times with the role propaganda played in that particular presidential election.
3) Lights, camera, action!- Younger audiences like nothing better than to sing, laugh, make funny noises, and wear costumes. As it turns out, these qualities are great tools for teaching history too. I love to use my book The Old Chisholm Trail; A Cowboy Song as a fun intro to those famously difficult cattle drives from the wild west. Very Short Version of how this works: I dress up as a cowboy and briefly explain how hard that trip must have been. Then I invite 3 volunteer cowboys onstage, where they don huge paper moustaches, and I give 3 more volunteers stuffed longhorn cattle to hold. As I (badly) sing funny verses from the real song, the cowboys and cows make appropriate cowboy and cow sound effects when I point to them after each verse, and the audience sings the chorus in their turn. It is hilarious, it’s the BEST teaching tool, and it all comes from a book. Try it!
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 10/5/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: history, picture books, art, Rosalyn Schanzer, How We Crossed the West, Add a tag
Ladies and gentlemen, in my book you CAN tell a book by its cover. In fact, it’s imperative. Covers can grab your attention by acting as their own little posters. The artwork on the best ones obviously looks terrific, both from close up and from far away. But art has other uses too. It can showcase the title....unless you’ve cleverly left your title out and decided to let the art speak for itself. And it gives a tantalizing hint about the story inside.
In my last blog, I set out a whole assortment of ways illustrations work overtime to enhance nonfiction. Today I thought it would be fun to pick a specific nonfiction cover and walk through the thought process behind developing the art. Well, the very first time I wrote a serious book of nonfiction, I wanted to give it my best shot. Hmmm… I always try to give things my best shot. But this book presented a special opportunity for me, and besides, I loved the subject matter. The book in question was How We Crossed the West: The Adventures of Lewis and Clark. Maybe you’d like to follow along and think up your own ideas for this cover.
By my own set of rules, a title should always be prominent and easy to read. That would be pretty easy if my title had been short. But why do anything the easy way? I had somehow managed to come up with a very long title, so to make it stand out, I thought I’d hand letter everything on a banner in the style of the early 1800’s. Here ‘tis. (In those days I didn’t have the greatest camera to shoot the following pictures, but if you click on each shot, you can blow them up a bit.)
Also by my own set of rules, a cover should be simple and powerful enough to be seen from far away. For example, a big close-up of the protagonist’s face can always work well. But far be it from me to do something easy. Besides, a book about Lewis and Clark means that there are two main characters and a supporting cast of all those hearty members of the Corps of Discovery. I decided to include as many of them as possible.
And how could I write this story and leave Sacagawea and York off the cover? You’ll more of these folks in a minute.
I also wanted to give a big hint about the tale of adventure inside the book. It occurred to me that just as Lewis and Clark were seeing most of the Indians along their route for the very first time, these same Indians were seeing a set of oddly dressed strangers with white and black skin for the very first time too. So I picked a specific day in the journey, drew the scenery the Corp passed and the boats they used and Indians they saw as accurately as humanly possible, and added them all into the mix. Try making that look like a strong, simple image. Not easy, but my rule does say to keep it simple. Here’s the full wrap-around cover with the back of the book included:
And this is the front cover the way you’d see it on the shelf, assuming the bookstore placed my book face-out and didn’t simply squeeze it onto a shelf with just the spine showing.
Every cover has its own story and they’re all different, so have a blast—take a closer look at some covers one of these days and try to figure out what the artist had in mind for his or her own little poster.
By: Linda Salzman,
on 9/14/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Vicki Cobb, Melissa Stewart, Deborah Heiligman, Rosalyn Schanzer, nonfiction news, Barbara Kerley, Add a tag
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!
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 8/31/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: illustrations, Rosalyn Schanzer, How We Crossed the West, history, picture books, Add a tag
We rarely focus on the artwork in our picture books, but I admit it; for me, this part of the job is the most fun. And whether my story has 500 words or 12,500 words, it’s also the most painstakingly researched and by far the most time consuming element of every nonfiction book I write. The right pictures work like magnets to draw readers in, and they often tell more about a story than words could ever do. Today I thought I'd explore some of the reasons why.
In the first place, artwork can show you all kinds of things you could never see any other way. Take illustrations about history for example. Even if you were to travel to every historical site on the planet, you could never see the action that made those places famous back in the day. Case in point: In my book HOW WE CROSSED THE WEST; THE ADVENTURES OF LEWIS AND CLARK, I got to paint the landscapes the way they really looked in 1804; populated by leaping pronghorn antelopes, black with buffalo as far as the eye could see, and dotted with lively Indian villages of every description. And the people! I could depict each explorer smack dab in the middle of his or her real adventures and I could show the same Indians Lewis and Clark wrote about in their journals too. Here are some details from a couple of bigger paintings:
York plays with Arikara kids; Mandans out hunting
Click on picture to see larger version
Medieval Paris maze; click on picture to make it bigIf we do our research right, boys will know at a glance that if they had been around during certain historic eras, they would have had to wear ruffles and silk tights, and girls would know that in certain societies they would have had to shave the top part of their heads or tattoo blue goatees on their faces. Kids would find out instantly what it was like to slog through mud and hail in a covered wagon or what kinds of strange contraptions miners used to find gold. In other words, each illustration can become your own private magic carpet that transports you directly into the pages in a picture book and lets you fly straight through some very real and truly amazing scenery.
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 8/3/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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You'll never guess who used to be the two biggest heroes in America before the Civil War. Well, I take it back. One of them was George Washington, so that part's a no-brainer. But who on earth was the other guy? I think you'll be surprised.
Hints:
1) This fearless he-man explored the world and won many battles against impossible odds by using his wits.
2) Better yet, he forged the Great American Dream by writing that class rank doesn't matter, and that anyone who's willing to work hard can make a better life on these shores.
3) Hmmm...I bet this will give it away.... He was also rescued by an Indian girl.
Yup, you got it! Back before the Civil War, Captain John Smith was America's first superstar, and every school child knew all about him. Yet from the time that war ended and up until recently, practically everything most Americans heard about John Smith has been false. And before I got around to "Searching for the Truth" while researching and writing JOHN SMITH ESCAPES AGAIN! I took plenty of those wrong-headed tales for granted myself. You probably remember a couple of the more recent examples:
1) Walt Disney told us that a tall blond John Smith and a beautiful Indian Princess named Pocahontas were sweethearts. (False! The truth is that Pocahontas was only a kid about 11 years old. There was never a hint of romance between the two. Almost every serious scholar now believes that the famous rescue story really did happen, though, and after studying a wide array of scholarly reports, I firmly agree. Oh, by the way, John Smith was actually a short, bearded guy with dark hair and Pocahontas would have shaved the top of her head like all other Powhatan girls her age.)
2) According to Terrence Makick, the director of The New World, John Smith was a wuss, a loser, and Pocahontas's boyfriend to boot. (False to the nth degree.)
John Smith's true story is an absolutely thrilling one, and every book he wrote about his amazing adventures and his dreams for America has been painstakingly dissected by the best and most thorough scholars and proven accurate. But let's not focus on Smith's European and American derring-do right now. Instead let's uncover a different mystery and search out another truth.
If John Smith was such a big hero, how did he fall out of favor in the first place and why did everyone and his brother lose sight of his enormous accomplishments? Here's what we've unearthed; it all began with some self-serving dirty politics and a batch of sloppy, nearsighted research.
In 1867, two years after the Civil War, a young Northern historian named Henry Adams decided that he wanted to make the South look bad by discrediting its greatest hero. Adams also hoped to make a big name for himself by causing a ruckus. He told one of his buddies that he planned to make "a rear attack on the Virginia aristocracy, who will be utterly gravelled by it..."
Then Adams wrote a pseudo-scholarly article for America's most popular and respected magazine, claiming that John Smith was a loud-mouthed braggart who lied about being saved by Pocahontas. And because the magazine was so popular, everyone believed Henry Adams. (Never mind that Smith dearly loved New England and was the first person to map it accurately. He even wrote entire books to persuade Europeans to settle there. And never mind that in his lengthy autobiography, Smith wrote only a single short paragraph about his rescue by little Pocahontas.)
To make matters worse, in 1893 a sloppy researcher from Hungary named Lewis L. Kropf quoted Hungarian sources to "prove" that Smith had lied about his great adventures when he was a soldier in Europe. Because American and English historians couldn't read any Hungarian, they believed what Kropf had said. John Smith's reputation was utterly destroyed, and false reports about his character still exist to this very day.
Luckily for us (and for John Smith), in the 1950's, a Viennese historian who was trained in Budapest reexamined John Smith's stories about his feats in Hungary and Transylvania. Her name was Laura Polanyi Striker. By re-reading stacks of original source material from Hungary chronicling battles in that part of the world, she found the names of every single person and place and event that Smith had written about. No Englishman could have made these stories up without being on the scene, and the accounts pointed directly to things Smith did while he was there. Kropf's lack of imagination was the problem; not being Hungarian, Smith had simply spelled the names of all those people and places and battles phonetically.
I'm not about to address every single false accusation made against John Smith in this short blog. But Dr. Striker ("Captain John Smith's Hungary and The Hungarian Historian, Lewis L. Kropf, on Captain John Smith's True Travels: A Reappraisal" and Virginia Magazine of History and Biography article "Lewis L. Kropf on Captain John Smith's True Travels" Jan. 1958), Philip L. Barbour ("The Three Worlds of Captain John Smith") and J. A. Leo Lemay ("The American Dream of Captain John Smith and Did Pocahontas Save Captain John Smith?") represent the gold standard of thorough research about Smith and the truth of his words and deeds.
It's a sad day when politics and sloppy research distort our history. When I wrote JOHN SMITH ESCAPES AGAIN! my goals were to help restore his reputation as a truly great American hero and to rescue him from oblivian. By focusing on Smith's many dramatic escapes as the lead-ins to his exciting story, I hoped to entice today's young readers into discovering more about the man whose deeds thrilled other young Americans when our nation was young.
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 7/6/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Continuing July's theme of "amazing discoveries made while researching our books"
Whenever I write nonfiction, I always use the Meat and Salt Method. The Meat is what sticks to your ribs and raises kids' SAT scores. It includes the very most important facts in a book; names of major players, pivotal events, and the dates and places where the action is. But I ask you...what good is Meat without any Salt? Salt lets me sprinkle in all the spicy little surprises that flavor a story and vault its characters to life. While digging up research material, I'm regularly blown away by Salty bits that no one seems to know yet. Here are a few favorite examples:
TWO FASHION STATEMENTS AND SOME MOSQUITOES
During his exploration of the American West, Meriwether Lewis wrote that the Chinook Indians flattened their infants' heads so much that they measured only 2 inches from front to back and were even thinner at the top. (Head flattening didn't lower the babies' intelligence one bit....but don't try this at home.)
Grownups had to look good too. Chinook women made their legs look fashionably fat by tying cords so tightly around their ankles that the circulation was cut off and their legs swelled right up.
And Lewis's co-captain William Clark may have been a brilliant explorer, but he was a terrible speller. I counted 17 different ways he spelled the word "mosquito" in his journal, and sometimes he spelled it 2 or 3 different ways on the same page.
FIREWORKS FOR FUN AND PROFIT
The fireworks you saw this weekend aren't just for 4th of July celebrations. Back in 1601, they helped John Smith become a Captain. Way before he ever sailed to Colonial Jamestown, he was a young soldier in a small outmanned Austrian army. To beat the huge Turkish army, he set off a long string of fireworks atop a ridge. This noisy trick lit up the skies and fooled the Turks into thinking that thousands of Austrian soldiers were firing guns at them. They charged the fireworks by mistakes and John Smith's army ambushed them from behind. For thinking up this winning maneuver, John Smith was made the captain of 250 horsemen.
WHAT A GUY!
Ben Franklin never patented his inventions because he wanted everyone to use them for free. One time his house was struck by a tremendous bolt of lightning, but it didn't catch on fire. His greatest free invention, the lightning rod, had saved his family's bacon, and nobody even knew it until years later when Ben was having some work done on his roof and discovered that the nine inch copper point on the rod had melted almost entirely away.
SALTY STORIES ABOUT WATER
Charles Darwin found that flamingos in South America actually thrive by drinking saltwater, and he discovered toads in the middle of a desert that can "drink" dew through their skin.
As gold seekers headed to California during the great Gold Rush of 1849, they ran into plenty more problems with drinking water. A woman sailing from New York via a shortcut through Nicaragua joked that "The water was of the very poorest kind. We called it 'Alligator Soup.' " I've mentioned this when commenting on an INK blog before, but after another passenger's ship rounded Cape Horn, the water had become so bad that he had to find a way of killing the bugs before drinking them. And when all food and water ran out as folks herded cows across Death Valley, another woman reported that "The old man traveling with us had a straw mattress. A small portion was dealt out to the cattle to keep the poor things from starving.
Speaking of cattle, when there was way too much water, cowboys on the Old Chisholm Trail used to cross muddy rivers by running on their cows' backs.
NOT A BLITHERING IDIOT
Proper patriots certainly didn't agree that God gave King George III the divine right to rule America. But the guy was never the stupid insane tyrant that my teachers and the Declaration of Independence said he'd been during the American Revolution. That's pure propaganda. Fact is, G III was the most well educated male ruler England had ever had! My research also revealed that he gave an enormous amount of his own money to charities, disguised himself as a peasant farmer so that he could secretly hand out gold coins to the poor, and worked to improve their education to boot. He opened his excellent free library to scholars, had a powerful telescope built, practiced cutting-edge scientific farming, and set up a Royal Academy of the Arts. Even though he usually agreed with them, it was the British Parliament, not King George, that made the laws and levied the taxes Americans hated. And although George had inherited a rare disease called porphyria that would rob him of his sanity in his old age, his mind was basically just fine during the Revolutionary War. Like his one-time enemy George Washington, G III was even admired by his countrymen as "the Father of the People."
See what I mean? It's all about the Salt.
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 6/1/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Back in Part One of this blog, we had some fun uncovering ways that old children's books tried to teach good moral values by distorting reality. First George Washington chopped down a cherry tree and got kudos for admitting it. False. Then came tales of white male heroes rescuing dim-witted damsels and dealing with evil or dim-witted minority groups. False too. And how about Dick and Jane and their exemplary perfect white family? False all over again. Finally there was the hilarious 1970's attempt to overcompensate for all past injustices. Unintended Consequences from each of these examples ran amok.
So what's the new game in town? These days, the very best adult books are as honest and even-handed about history as can be, and they regularly win big awards and top the best-seller lists. I'm delighted to report that there are plenty of first-rate history books on the market for kids too. But! Picture books still follow a politically correct agenda that discourages the inclusion of certain important stories from our past. Let's follow this thread.
In 1963, Dr. Martin Luther King said "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character." We've come a long way since 1963 and so have the books we write for children like Dr. King's. I was thrilled to see barriers crumble when I voted for our new president and he won so overwhelmingly. But our nonfiction books don't always judge people by the content of their character, and the reason is not at all what you'd expect.
Sure, today's picture books are filled with positive tales about heroes and heroines of every color, and that's exactly as it should be. Stories relating the woes that women and minorities have overcome are lauded even more. More power to them...they deserve the accolades. But here's the rub.
The playing field still isn't level. If it ever flattens out, we'll be able to judge every single individual on his or her merits alone. But lots of picture book folks are so afraid to offend minorities and women or to alienate their audiences in any other way that they end up censoring important true stories from the past or leave them out altogether. After all, who wants to be accused of prejudice, especially when no prejudice is intended? This mindset causes two big fat Unintended Consequences:
1) Now don't shoot me, but one unintended consequence is that only white males can do foolish or terrible things in the world of picture books. The rest of us (including yours truly and my family) are still off limits. Nobody sought this result on purpose, but most picture books about history don't judge people of every race, religion, and gender by the content of their character--especially when their character is not picture perfect by today's standards (though as we know, definitions of morality change significantly over time and from place to place and culture to culture).
2) By omitting anything that's the least bit negative about non-white "minorities" and women, we simultaneously dumb things down for our children and distort their entire perception of history.
What might this politically correct mindset mean in practice? Let's use our national icon George Washington again as a protagonist to understand this fear of alienating anyone. Consider these inflammatory examples:
~In George Washington's Teeth, a funny picture book that tells how George lost his choppers, everyone gets the humor, and they don't think any less of our great first president either.
~ But if there were a book called, say, George Washington Carver's Teeth, no one would get the humor. Folks would think it was racist. We cannot laugh at ourselves as equals yet.
~It's perfectly legit to say in a picture book that George Washington had slaves. You can also show Super Fierce George fighting hard to conquer his enemies, and you can even paint pictures of his generals massacring innocent Indian women and children in their homes. George gets to show extreme anger and fatigue and every other human emotion, whether it's positive or not, just like any other human being. Every bit of this is a genuine part of history and people should know about it. Your book will get good reviews for its honesty.
~But check this out; in picture books, anyone who tries to say that Indians had slaves, or anyone who shows Super Fierce Indians fighting hard to conquer Europeans, or depicts Indians massacring women and children in their homes will be thrown from the parapets for such "negative" and "scary" portrayals, even though this is a genuine part of history too. Unlike George, Indians cannot show extreme anger or negative emotions in picture books about history, and explaining that their actions were provoked or were culturally legitimate is not enough to keep this very real part of history ensconced in school libraries and bookstores. Indians are real people too, just like George. Yet the one and only portrayal of Indians that does not create a firestorm is as a romanticized ideal, which is yet another stereotype.
See? You're probably already mad that I've thrown such a politically incorrect football. Why stoke these fires when there are plenty of important, entertaining, and fabulously interesting-but-safe topics to write about? Besides, you could sell more books in the bargain. The current attempt to set only "good" historic examples for younger children sounds noble, I guess. But do we really need a bunch of scolds, moralizers, and hypocrites censoring history for kids? I think not. What we do need is to be aware of history in all its complexity so that we can handle the present with knowledge (and not malice) aforethought. Some day when prejudice becomes a distant memory, our history books and our sense of humor can finally become even-handed and honest about the content of people's character, whether it happens to be sterling or fatally flawed or just plain human.
So what to you think out there, people? Fire away--it's your turn.
By: Linda Salzman,
on 6/1/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: Rosalyn Schanzer, Kathleen Krull, Jan Greenberg, Add a tag
From Rosalyn Schanzer
If you happen to be in Kentucky on Thursday, June 18, I will be speaking three times at the Fourth Annual Fleming County Reading Festival. And the good news is that the first 100 or so people to get there will receive a free signed copy of one of my books! You can find the festival at 1449 Elizaville Road, Flemingsburg, Kentucky 41041. It’s on the Fleming Mason Energy grounds on Highway 32, which is not very far south of Cincinnati Ohio. Here’s my part of the schedule:
11:00 (professional development session for teachers) Killing the Bugs before Drinking Them: How to Make Non-fiction Spring to Life
1:00 (grades K-3) The Old Chisholm Trail - a cowboy song with costumes and sound effects provided by the audience…and maybe a surprise title as well!
3:00 (4th grade and up) What Darwin Saw; the Journey that Changed the World
From Kathleen Krull:
An interview with Kathleen Krull will be posted to the Park Ridge (Illinois) Public Library blog (http://prkcs.wordpress.com/) on June 5. On June 22 she will be speaking at the 30th Annual Reading/Language Arts Conference at San Diego State University http://edweb.sdsu.edu/ste/documents/masters/summer_reading_conference_flyer_2009.pdf
From Jan Greenberg:
Jan Greenberg, editor - Side by Side New Poems Inspired by Art from around the World
CCBC (Cooperative Children’s Book Center) 2009 Annual Best-of-the-Year
NCTE (National Council Teachers of English) 2009 Notable Children’s Book in the Language Arts.
Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s Books of 2008
Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Through the Gates and Beyond,
NCSS (National Council of Social Studies) Social Studies Trade Books for Young People 2009
ALA (American Library Association) Notable Book 2009
Bank Street College of Education Best Children’s books of 2008.
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 5/4/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
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Hmmmm. The obvious unintended consequences of such stories-with-a-moral (and there are plenty) are that the minute kids find out they're false, they either lose respect for the grown-up who tells the tale or they learn that certain lies must be OK. On a personal level, here's another unintended consequence. When my elementary school teacher told us this "true" story, we thought it was totally lame, that George Washington was a Little Goody Two-Shoe, and that we never wanted to hear about George's corny self ever again.
On general principle, I'm in favor of telling the unvarnished truth to kids (and not because of Parson Weems either). For example, if "bad" things were done in the past, we'd profit more by learning from history's mistakes than by covering them up. Besides, the truth is so much more interesting than the cover-ups. But what's most important is that rewriting history leads to unintended consequences even when the authors' intentions are good.
Are things any better today? Enormously--but only up to a point. As we speak, all sorts of books, TV, and movies for young kids are still skirting the truth. Sometimes inaccuracies have wormed their way into the media because the authors didn't do their homework. But many twisted tales were planned on purpose in an effort to do some good. What's that supposed to mean? Read on.
Let's fast forward to the time between 1940 and the mid 1960's, when women and minorities regularly got short shrift in children's media. Elementary school students learned to read by slogging through textbooks such as Fun with Dick and Jane, which aimed to set a good example by starring an exemplary perfect white family: Father was the Provider in his suit and hat. Mother was the Happy Homemaker wearing an apron and holding a mop. And their perfectly behaved children, Dick, Jane, and Sally, frolicked on the lawn with their dog, Spot.
At the same time, kids' cowboy movies and radio shows starred white cowboy heroes as the Good Guys. But the Indians were practically all Bad Guys except for The Lone Ranger's sidekick, Tonto, who could barely speak English and liked to say "Ugh." Women were pious weaklings who cried into their hankies and had to be rescued by white Good Guys. And most black people fit into about 4 simple stereotypes; they had menial jobs, were great tap dancers, were Mammies on plantations, or were the butt of jokes. Hispanics and Asians were barely part of the picture during peacetime, but prejudice against all minorities was unrepentant.
Enter the unintended consequences. Surely millions of kids who didn't live like Dick and Jane's perfect white family felt somehow deficient and people who did live like Dick and Jane felt righteous if not downright superior. As time went by, members of minorities got mad--who can blame them? And by the way, everyone thought schoolbooks were the most boring things on the planet.
So to set things straight, publishers thought up a new approach. Around 1975, all the big textbook publishers started sending out guidelines for the stories and pictures in their books. I know this because I illustrated literally hundreds of these books in my hungry days and I still have their guidelines. In the usual effort to do some good, they required us to show all minorities (an equal number on every page) as heroic, brilliant leaders who did everything right. But any characters who played the part of fools, bad guys, cripples, or inferiors had to be white males. I am NOT making this up!
In one series of stories I illustrated, I had to show a stupid white male who fell asleep on his job of cutting a long strip of marshmallow goop flowing out of a tube into bite-sized pieces. But while this poor dummy was sleeping, the goop grew into a marshmallow the size of a house....and was discovered by his smart female boss (get it?) when she was up on the roof fixing a leak and saw it hidden in the alley. Then there was one tale about a brave young girl who raced over an icy mountain during a storm to deliver an urgent message to a black king, and another tale about a stupid white king who was outsmarted by his youngest daughter. In yet another story, a single mother and her daughter were remodeling their house and convinced 6 kids (3 girls, 3 boys of all races) to paint their fence, but the kids accidentally used glue instead of paint and got stuck. I drew one girl whose back was stuck to the fence from the tips of her braids all the way down to her feet. Whadaya know--the art had to be redone. My art director wrote "Girl too passive. Do not show females in passive roles." A fellow artist was told to draw a very muscular woman in a crowd who was a head taller than the wimpy white male standing next to her. His next story had to picture a white male secretary in an apron trying to cook. The untended consequence was that a whole generation of little readers must have thought all white males were idiots.
Doh. I know these readers and so do you. But popular opinion to the contrary, white males are not the sole source of evil and stupidity in the world. Kindly remember that there are good and bad and smart and dumb people in every ethnic group regardless of gender. You'd never know it, though, because the next wave of messing with the truth for the "greater good" was to make stories for kids Politically Correct. This effort is still part of the picture today and has plenty of unintended consequences, which I hope to address in my next blog.
And by the way, have any of these rules or unintended consequences ever affected any of you?
By: Gretchen Woelfle,
on 4/21/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: 2009 titles, Rosalyn Schanzer, April Pulley Sayre, Gretchen Woelfle, Add a tag
Once an English major, always an English major. Now that Garrison Keillor has made our geeky selves rather cool (at least to each other,) I can publicly admit how much I love to dive into books and pick them apart. And when I read Rosalyn Schanzer’s delightful recent post, Coming to the Theater Near You! and April Pulley Sayre’s stunning Honk, Honk, Goose! Canada Geese Start a Family (illustrated by Huy Voun Lee,) I couldn’t resist taking a dive.
[Full disclosure: April is a good friend of mine, which did not influence this review in any way! I’ve never met Huy Voun Lee – so that proves my objectivity. Besides, I’m just tagging behind the critics who are giving this book stars and more stars.]
So, back to Rosalyn’s movie talk…. As a Screenwriter Sayre has written a tale of romance, danger, and heroic vigilance. Our hero, Father Goose is handsome, assertive, brave, romantic, and good with children – every female’s dream. But his is not an easy job. Predators lay in wait to harm his family. He sometimes fails to avert trouble, but he never gives up. Sigh. What a guy.
Co-directors Sayre and Lee work together to give this story passion and drama. Lee’s stunning cut-paper illustrations give us a stylized but realistic rendering of the world of Canada geese – habitat and predators, as well as details of domesticity. Danger abounds, which Lee shows us in many spot illustrations, but Father Goose is ever-alert. Sayre, as always, uses nature sounds and rhythms to dramatize her story.
Casting Director April chose to make Father Goose the protagonist. Many animal books focus on Mama, but Papa gets the spotlight here. Huy Vuon emphasizes his protector role by showing him with wings spread, neck stretched forward, tongue extended as he speaks his lines boldly: “Honk, hee-honk! Hisssssssssssss!”
Costume Designer Lee exquisitely uses her cut-paper medium to give us finely-cut feathers on the wings which, when spread, dominate the page. She uses downy-textured papers for the geese and goslings’ bodies. Thus we “feel” the power of their bodies and the fineness of their down feathers.
Lee serves as Set Designer with help from Sayre. Lee shows the geese’s habitat of open grassland, (plain green paper with cut-out dark green ridges to show contours and elevation,) and a pond (two-tone mottled blue paper.) This dreamy blue covers the entire double-page spread of the couple’s courtship. We are immersed in the setting as they do what needs to be done to start a family. Sayre’s sounds enhance the setting: “Dabble dip” as they paddle, “Pluck, pull” when they feed, “Stretch, curve, their necks danced.”
Father Goose’s stunts are set up by both author and illustrator. As Stunt Co-coordinators, Sayre describes a raccoon invading the nest and breaking an egg. Father honks, hisses, and lunges. Lee shows us a scary goose in profile, wings reaching beyond the page, neck crossing from one page to another. I’d run away too, like the raccoon.
Cinematographer Lee alters her angles throughout the book: wide establishing shots in the beginning, close-ups for intimate moments, then wide shots showing the new goose family, leading up to the final extreme close-up of Father Goose staring at us and giving us his loudest ever “Honk, hee-honk, honk! Hisssssssss!”
These are Sayre’s Special Effects that bring her hero and the story to life – a sound design that begins with lots of honks, followed by splishes and splashes, flap flaps, more honks, crack crick peeps, still more honks, plop plops, peeps and yawns, and ending with Father’s triumphant Honk. Well done, Father Goose. Well done, April Pulley Sayre and Huy Voun Lee.
Hollywood, are you watching?
By: Rosalyn Schanzer,
on 2/27/2009
Blog: I.N.K.: Interesting Non fiction for Kids (Login to Add to MyJacketFlap)
JacketFlap tags: What Darwin Saw, Rosalyn Schanzer, 2009 titles, Add a tag
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Charles Darwin didn’t always look like this: 
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The Words I originally set my research in motion by excerpting the juiciest and most relevant parts of
Extras Among many other things, I added to my book all kinds of fun and interesting science stuff: Pictures showing what the fossil animals looked like and how big they were when they were alive; stories about the ways that European people changed the face of other continents—and how European plants and animals did likewise; very cool examples of 20 experiments and research projects Darwin thought up to help explore his theory; the reasons he kept his work secret for 20 long years, and the effect that his discoveries had on the public in 1859 and on the rest of the world until this very day.
The Tree of Life
Unfortunately, many (too many) of the folk who dispute evolution haven't evolved enough to understand it.
Thanks for keeping up the Darwin cheering section, Rosalyn!
I was a molecular biology researcher (studying genes and DNA) for many years before I became a writer. In all my years in research labs, no scientist I knew ever disagreed with evolution. We all accepted evolution as fact, and not because we were deaf to alternate theories, but because we could see the fingerprints of evolution all over our DNA and on the DNA of every other living thing we studied. Want evidence for evolution? It is written right in the DNA.
Thanks Jim - you made me laugh out loud. As Darwin said, "It is those who know little, not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.
And to back up your comment, Rebecca, I think it's interesting that Francis Collins, the scientist who led the Human Genome Project and discovered disease genes, is an Evangelical Christian. He believes in both God and science and says that evolution is not just a theory and that he has no patience with people who think that way. The literal interpretation of scripture that implies that the world was created as-is in 6 days just a few thousand years ago has nothing to do with the reality we can read in DNA with our own 2 eyes.