Category: Book Review

Kids 5-8 bored with COVID? Watch This!

6/7/2020

My latest book, Why Do I Dry Off?, has just been published. It completes my STEM Play series for parents and kids to do together. Good for children as young as four. My m. o. is to integrate questions about the natural environment of a child's life with simple activities that explore phenomena so that children make discoveries, often non-intuitive. My books exemplify the way scientists think and act. I try to have my readers come to understand why scientists love science.

Most professional scientists have discovered science by fourth grade. I have a scientist son, Josh, who also has a scientist son, Jonny. (My other son, Theo, is an artist, I was once that, too. He drew my logo.)

Here's the link to the three titles:
Why Can I Suck Through a Straw?
Why Do I Dry Off?
Why Does My Ice Cream Melt?

Survival at a Mountain Top

16/6/2020

Have you ever heard of a pika? It was a new animal to me. It lives in mountains at 10,000 feet and, as a skier, I have been to its habitat many times but didn't know where or how to look for it.
Thanks to Pika Country: Climate Change at the Top of the World by Dorothy Hinshaw Patent & Marlo Garnsworthy, I am now enlightened. The pika, also know as a rock rabbit, is yet another version of a canary in a coal mine. It requires cool summer temperatures to forage for food, (mostly grasses that dry to become hay) and stockpile enough to stay alive all winter.

"Pikas are specially adapted to live in the chilly alpine environment among
the rocks and plants.
"In fact, pikas are usually only found in the mountains where the temperatures
  are cool. In temperatures warmer than 77 degrees Fahrenheit (25 degrees Celsius), pikas quickly overheat and die."

Pika Country, illustrated with photographs by skilled nature photographer Dan Hartman, is a picture book with intimate images of the pika barking, leaping, squeezing into a small rock crevasse, and carrying a mouthful of vegetation. How did he ever get those shots? Obviously, he had to be there, be ready and be patient.

The poor pika is prey to mountain mammals, like the weasel and fox and raptors, including the golden eagle and the prairie falcon. Added to its woes, its habitat is shrinking due to climate change. Where can you go when you're at the top of the hill and there's no more "up" to go?

The authors are exceptionally good at explaining the predicament by including many other alpine animals and trees that will be wiped out when mountain tops warm up.

They also include an excellent explanation of climate change and what kids (and caring adults) can do to slow down climate change. Maybe it will also create the demise of the winter olympics?

A Candidate for a Child's Home Library

7/5/2020

In my last post, I quoted a literacy statistic for a children's home library, "Children growing up in homes with at least twenty books get three years more schooling than children from bookless homes, independent of their parents’ education, occupation, and class." A children's home library contains books that, by definition, will be read more than once. Roxie Munro's glorious adventure under water on a coral reef, Dive In: Swim with Sea Creatures at Their Actual Size, is a perfect candidate.

Dive In is enticing on so many levels. As someone who has had the memorable experience of snorkeling at the Great Barrier Reef, once was not enough but once is all I got. Munro's book powerfully creates the experience. You are immersed and absorbed, never leaving the sea, viewing 29 of the gorgeous, quirky, fantastical inhabitants of coral reefs. It deserves to be revisited time and time again.

Did you ever hear of a spotted cleaner shrimp or a longsnout seahorse or the queen triggerfish, to name a few? And what's that gray thing that starts looming in the background on 15,16, 17, 18 and folds out into two double-spreads on pages 19-22 to reveal a reef shark that is 8 feet long? (Measuring that critter, alone, is worth owning the book.)

This is a book that commands study and involvement that goes way beyond the five-minute bedtime read. Munro includes a simple fact or two for each critter that are gems:

"The common octopus is a mollusk, as are snails, clams, and squids. Like a squid,
an octopus also changes colors and patterns to camouflage itself. An octopus has
excellent vision and a large brain, and is considered the most intelligent,
invertebrate. It even uses tools to build its den, which might feature a door that
opens and closes!"

My kid-like curious brain is teeming with questions to know more. If it's a mollusk, where's its shell? How many colors can it be? How do we know that? What does its eyes have to do with the size of its brain?

The back-matter reveals a key to the 29 different species as a "walk in the park" diagram including the relative sizes depicted as actual size in the book. Yep, there's the reef shark, taking up space in the middle. And the end papers feature coral reefs of the world, including the one I dove into.

Roxie Munro brings the skills of a fine artist and the discipline of a diligent nonfiction author to revealing a complex and glorious ecosystem currently under attack from global warming.

If Dive In is the first book on coral reefs in a child's library, it will not be the last.

The Maestro of Glass

29/2/2020

Glass is an amazing material! It is transparent, can be delicate and easy to shatter or it can be strong, it can be colored and be manipulated to become any shape an artist or craftsperson desires. It is mostly sand with some other chemicals mixed in, depending on what it will be used for. In order to change its shape, it must become a liquid and that requires extremely high, red-hot temperatures--2800°F (1500°C). Working with glass requires skills and respect. Expect failure from shattering (never mind, it can be remelted) and always the danger of serious burns.

Dale Chihuly is a visionary who has mastered the manipulation of glass to create art. His life and work are captured in World of Glass: The Art of Dale Chihuly by the award-winning team of iNK author Jan Greenberg and Sandra Jordan. In this biography, a first for young people, Chihuly comes alive as an extraordinarily bold person who was hooked on glass the first time he blew a bubble in a glob of molten glass at the end of a steel pipe. If he twirled the molten bubble of glass it widened into a disk. And he could add color to the molten glass by rolling it in shattered glass color sticks. Chihuly has created distinctive glass sculptures that are sometimes massive, brilliantly colored and as eye-catching as they are light catching.

His works begin with an imaginative sketch on paper. He has a team of artisans to help him create his vision, which took a hit when he lost one eye by going through a windshield in an automobile accident:

" 'There was no despair because I just felt so lucky that I didn't lose both my eyes.' Instead of an artificial eye, he put on a swashbuckling black eye patch. It became one of his trademarks."

The authors describe how this loss, which cost him depth perception, and the physicality of working quickly to shape molten glass led him to forming a team of glassblowers who could create his vision:

"After dislocating his shoulder in an accident while body surfing, Dale finally gave up blowing glass. He assumed the role of director making drawings in the hotshop to pass along ideas to his team. His ability to lead as well as to spot talent revitalized him."

World of Glass is a beautifully produced book, lavishly illustrated with full colored photographs and including a double-wide page to be unfolded, emphasizing the scope and power of Chihuly's work. Greenberg and Jordan had personal access to the Maestro himself, as well as his team. The back matter includes a list of places where you can see Chihuly's masterpieces for yourself. Only then can you truly marvel at the scale of his work.

Publication date: May 12, 2020

Light at the End of the Tunnel

12/1/2020

For the past 25 years there has been a national war between so-called education reformers and public schools. Education historian and indefatigable blogger on the topic, Diane Ravitch, has been chronicling the attacks, losses and now, finally, victories through her blog, where she posts up to ten times a day, every day, since April of 2012. In her new book Slaying Goliath: The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America's Public Schools, she pulls the disparate threads together and writes a brilliant, page-turner story of this war against public schools for a period that included my 5 grandchildren.

Who are the bad guys? Millionaires and billionaires who come from a business background where forces of free-market choices, competition, and new standards create disruption in the market place allowing the best products to rise to the surface. Ravitch names names. We know who they are and they include Bill Gates, Betsy De Vos, and the Walton (Wallmart) families.
Ravitch aptly changes their names from education "Reformers" to education "Disrupters." Measurement is key to determining educational success in the form of high stakes testing that occurs every school year for grades k-12. Right out of the starting gate the Disrupters' premise was wrong-headed and untested.

The methods of this warfare included slamming public schools as "failing" and demonizing teachers while supporting the creation of brand-new charter schools and vouchers to pay religious schools using tax payer money and selling the concept that now parents have "choice." If you knew what it takes to create and sustain a good school, you would know that non-educators with dough are not the people who should be starting one no matter how pure their motives. (I served 18 months on the board of a charter school that is now shuttered.) Politicians from presidents, G.W. Bush and Barack Obama, to local school board members jumped onto the shiny new Disrupter bandwagons. It never occurred to them that America's children were Guinea pigs. Disruption is not healthy for children. Using children to experiment with the profit-motive in education is an insane idea. Where can the profits for investors come from? Real estate (the new schools need space to rent, build or buy), using cheap, young and untrained teachers from Teach for America, and the selling of technology. Education doesn't produce a product that you can sell for a profit. You can't garnish the wages of a state-educated worker. But every time money changes hands, someone's pockets are lined, often illegally, since there is no mandated oversight for charter schools and many opportunities for corruption. Less that 40% of the funding for these new ventures are used for what happens in classrooms. And the Disrupters did not like to discuss that the funding not only came from the wealthiest Americans but also from the local public school budgets, thus short-changing resources for more than 85% of American students.

The collateral damage of this policy of disruption was the destruction of teacher morale and the anxiety that the high-stakes testing put on children. Test prep robbed children of the joy of learning. It made them fearful that if they did not do well on the test, their teachers would be fired. Ravitch's book meticulously cites the damage done in cities and states over the years. It's enough to make your blood boil! About ten years ago, I was invited to speak at Southern Florida University's Education Department. The faculty were steeling themselves to greet the first entering class of FCAT babies, who had taken assessment exams at the end of every one of their 12 years of schooling. Now they were to be trained as teachers. Their professors found them to be passive, docile, and answer-driven, fearful of questions for which they had no answers and tied to using boring texts and worksheets as their main pedagogical tools.

Another example:  My grandson, Jonny, who was a very serious student didn't do well on tests. (Currently he is the top student in his electrical engineering class at Buffalo University but still worried about the Graduate Record Exam). He attended a small public school in Western NY state which was not overly scrutinized by the powers-that-be and had a staff that cared about their students. But still they had to adhere to the standards and the testing. When Jonny was in seventh grade I asked him how many of his teachers were having "fun" teaching him. By "fun" I meant that they enjoyed being in the classroom and were present for their students. He thought for a long time before he came up with his sixth grade Language Arts teacher. I concluded that none of his seventh grade teachers were having any fun and I had a follow up question: How did he know they weren't having fun?"Because," he responded, "I'm not learning very much."

Ravitch is very careful to let doubters know how she knows every fact in the book with 30 pages of citations in very small type at the back of the book. In her final chapter, "Goliath Stumbles," she cuts loose with a passionate summation of how the tides are finally turning due to the grass-root rebellions of teachers and parent activists who defeated referendums, politicians, and lobbyists with their strikes, protests, social media organizations and most importantly, their votes. I can imagine how fast and hard she hit those computer keys as she wrote these first glimmers that the tide is turning and humanity and sanity are finally returning to American public schools.

Thanks for the lesson, Diane Ravitch. Many still need it.

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Kids 5-8 bored with COVID? Watch This!

Survival at a Mountain Top

A Candidate for a Child's Home Library

The Maestro of Glass

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Vicki Cobb

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Kids 5-8 bored with COVID? Watch This!

Survival at a Mountain Top

A Candidate for a Child's Home Library

The Maestro of Glass

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Vicki Cobb

​​​​Archives

​Categories

Links

Company

Contact

Archives

Categories