Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
Vicki Cobb's Blog
  • Vicki Cobb's Blog
  • About
  • Contact

Getting Our Foot in the Classroom Door—The Nonfiction Minute

29/5/2018

 
Picture

When I first started iNK Think Tank in 2009, the economy had tanked, school visits and book contracts had been abruptly canceled and I had time on my hands. For years I knew that we nonfiction authors were perhaps the most over-looked and underutilized resource available to the cash-strapped educational community. Why not find a cost-effective way to make authors like me and our books available to schools?

At the time, I was involved in contributing to a group-blog called Interesting Nonfiction for Kids (the origin of our logo iNK). Founded by Linda Salzman, a children’s nonfiction fan, she recruited about 2 dozen of her favorite authors who wrote their posts pro bono. The Common Core Standards had been announced, which required more reading of nonfiction. But we authors knew that most teachers had very little awareness of the treasure of nonfiction books, related to their required curricula, that was sitting idly on their school library shelves. We also knew that teachers were so busy that they didn’t know how or where to find such books. So I approached my fellow blog contributors in July of 2009, and convinced everyone to create a database that would align our books to the Standards so teachers could search and get lists of appropriate titles to fulfill their needs. We discovered that such a database needed a website, which we launched on October 7, 2009. Everyone donated money to make it happen. The volunteer effort was overwhelming. And the response to the website was strong. So far we have about 8,000 registered users.

It became clear over the next few years that the classroom use of nonfiction literature had been preempted by standardized test performance —testing every grade, K-12, every year turning classrooms into joyless test preparation skill and drill. Even if teachers knew about our work, there was no time in the school year, with the well entrenched pacing programs to do anything but the prescribed curriculum with the prescribed reading material. That material has been provided by behemoth school and textbook publishers who have dominated classrooms for years.

One winter evening at the beginning of 2014, my friend and colleague, author Alexandra Siy called me. The conversation went as follows:

Alex: The Common Core Standards say that kids need to read a lot more nonfiction, right?
Me: Right!
Alex: Well, we write a lot of nonfiction but teachers don’t even know where to find our work and kids don’t even know we exist.
Me: That’s true.
Alex: Kids have to read a lot of boring material and teachers are over-burdened with data collection, evaluations, test preparation, testing. When do they have the time to find quality nonfiction for their students?
Me. That’s a problem.
Alex: So here’s a solution: It’s a website called the Nonfiction Minute with posts written by award-winning authors. We make it available free to teachers all over the world. Suddenly kids will be reading great-quality nonfiction every single day. The essays will be very short. Teachers can bring it up on their Smart Board, use it as a do-now. They can launch discussions and conversations. They can launch units on science, math, history, art, anything!
Me: I LOVE it! It’s a way to get our foot into classroom doors.


So a few of us in iNK began writing 400-word essays on subjects that interested us. We read our own Minutes aloud to make mp3 files so less fluent readers could enjoy the content and the language, we added intriguing visuals. We started posting in September of 2014. About that time, my former publisher, editor and friend, Jean Reynolds called me. She had retired when she sold the two publishing companies she had founded—Millbrook and Roaring Brook Presses. She saw the Nonfiction Minute as an opportunity to do the thing she loved most: editing. I am enough of a pro to know that it was exactly what we needed to make the Nonfiction Minute a success. I told her that I wanted to pay her but didn’t have any funding to do so. Nevertheless, she was hooked. She had complete control to edit some of the best writers in the world—and she didn’t have to deal with inventory, payroll, personnel hiring and firing, book production. I was thrilled that she wanted the job and stepped back into being just another one of her writers.

Since the Nonfiction Minute went live in 2014 to now, we’ve had more than 3 million page views and 300,000 users.   We've become a nonprofit and we've tried crowd-funding and  grant writing to find a way to become financially sustainable.  Now we are trying a new experiment.  We are creating an iNK Membership for Teachers, Students and Parents.  The fee for annual membership for Charter Subscribers is $19.95.  Members will get full access to all the Minutes and the Archive and the Transfer to Teaching (T2T. ) The public will have access to the NM blog and 10 free Nonfiction Minutes over the summer.  In the fall they will get a daily free Minute with its T2T but only on the day it is published.   The public will not have access to the archive and we intend to offer Members other perks now in planning stages.  You can learn more about this transition on  Monday, July 4.
 
We hope that the Nonfiction Minute is an introduction to us authors whose books are already in school libraries.  We'd love some feedback from librarians if this has happened. In the meantime, w
hen teachers ask me how they can justify the classroom time needed to read and discuss the Nonfiction Minutes, I grin and say slyly: “Call it ‘test prep.'”

Appetizers of Animal Minutes

22/5/2018

 
Picture
iNK authors are committed to excellence.  We believe that children must be exposed to excellence to understand what it takes to produce it.  It is wonderful when the world acknowledges our efforts. Here's Publishers Weekly review of our latest collection of Nonfiction Minutes:

 
FLASH: 30 Animals That Share Our World (9781633225008) reviewed by Publishers Weekly (16.5k print circ, 1.84 uvm).

30 Animals That Share Our World
Edited by Jean Reynolds. Seagrass, $14.95 (144p) ISBN 978-1-63322-500-8

Reynolds, who edits the blog The Nonfiction Minute, offers a digestible collection of 30 animal-themed essays by children’s book writers. The works focus on famous animals, such as White House pets throughout history and Seaman, the Newfoundland dog from the Lewis and Clark expedition. Other essays center on animals for which the authors have particular reverence or fear. Trish Marx writes about her terror of the wolf spiders she would find in webs as a child; she then recounts an incident in which wolf spiders in Australia were flooded out of their burrows: “If this damage in Wagga Wagga was caused by climate change, imagine the invasions and changes that may yet come.” Elsewhere, Dorothy Hinshaw Patent shares the captivating story of the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone National Park. Photographs accompany each short piece, along with a stylized illustration of each subject. The brief essays introduce many ideas and concepts; readers eager to learn more can do so through lists of suggested resources. Ages 8–12. (May)
​

Link to the review: https://www.publishersweekly.com/978-1-63322-500-8

Full disclosure:  I wrote one of the Minutes in this collection.  I found an amazing fact and couldn't resist writing about it.  Did you know that a polar bear, asleep on the ice at -40 degrees C or F (they're the same at that temperature point), complete with additional wind chill are invisible at night if you're looking for them with night-vision goggles?  You'll have to read the book to find out why.


Dignifying the Much-Maligned Hyena

16/5/2018

 
Picture
Field biologists are a special breed of people fueled by a passion that makes a life of luxury and creature comforts pale with respect to the knowledge they gain from a life studying creatures in the wild.  Jane Goodall is perhaps the most famous trailblazer in this kind of science with her lifelong study of chimpanzees by living among them.  But she is certainly not alone as we meet Kay Holekamp in The Hyena Scientist, by award-winning nonfiction author, Sy Montgomery, illustrated with photographs by famed nature photographer, Nic Bishop. 

The Hyena Scientist is part of the Scientists in the Field Series, which are always a joy to read as the motivation and skill sets of field biologists become palpable to the reader through the talents of the authors and photographers who create these books.  In this case, Sy Montgomery and Nic Bishop traveled to a game park on the Masai Mara in Kenya, to gain enough first-hand knowledge from the source so that they could communicate to the reader. Montgomery and Bishop are not unlike journalistic embeds in military units who report authentic information about war. 
​
According to Montgomery’s report in Chapter 1 of her book: “…This species is almost universally despised across human cultures.  Feared for biting children, hated for digging up corpses, dismissed as cowardly scavengers, the loving, social attractive animals playing and resting in front of us are widely considered to be dirty, ugly and mean.”  The “Not so!” that follows for the remainder of this 72-page, lavishly illustrated book for young adults (and adults) is an eye-opening narrative that introduces us to this species and the people who study them.

Here are some of the unusual traits of hyenas:  Their social groups are female dominated.  Indeed, the females are about 10% larger than the males.  Their heads are enormous compared to their bodies and their jaws and teeth can crush and grind the bones of larger animals.  Hyenas are not just scavengers, feeding on the leftovers of a lion’s kill, although they will eat just about any meat they can find.  They are also skilled hunters—the second largest carnivore in Africa after the lion.  As a result, they are a keystone specie that controls the life of an ecosystem.  What happens if we kill all the hyenas? This once  happened in South Africa, “The result? Ecological disaster:  explosions of herbivores reduced grasslands to deserts.  Soil erosion ruined roads and altered the courses of rivers. Only when the predators returned did the ecosystem begin to recover.”

As embeds, Montgomery and Bishop become a part of the five-person crew headed by Kay Holekamp, who live together in a camp, not far from the dens of the hyenas.  We get to know each of them and their varied backgrounds; most are graduate students, but one is a native Masai who started at the camp as an assistant cook and is now planning to study in the United States before returning to continue working in the field in his native Kenya. 

One trait they all have is patience.  Each day they plan on morning and afternoon sorties to observe the hyena colonies in action.  The hyenas are habituated to their vehicles (that took some time!) so they are not a disruption to their lives.  The thinking of the scientists is that you must be there every day to increase the odds of viewing something unusual and spectacular.  Montgomery and Bishop lucked out and witnessed one such rare event.  No spoiler here.

The subtitle of this series is “Where science meets adventure.”  The Hyena Scientist might get some couch potatoes with their fingers on video games thinking that there just might be a few other options on how to live a life. 
​
My curiosity (and a book contract) got me to the Masai Mara many years ago.  Unforgettable and transformative.  Montgomery and Bishop brought me back.
 

Knocking Themselves Out

4/5/2018

 
Picture
Among the most distinctive noises of the forest is the sound of a woodpecker banging away at a tree trunk. Its tattoo rat-a-tat can be as fast as a pneumatic drill. Their headache-producing activity of pecking, rapid fire, into a tree makes them the easiest bird to recognize. No other creature acts that way. And if you need motivation to get off your couch and into nature, Sneed B. Collard III’s Woodpeckers: Drilling Holes & Bagging Bugs is an irresistible invitation to grab a camera and guide book and run into a forest, any forest, and listen for yourself. Woodpeckers are such strange birds they make you shake your head. Want to know more? Collard makes you wonder and laugh at the same time:

“Why? Why do woodpeckers peck into trees so much? Is it because they hate trees? Are they full of avian anger that they’re trying to work out? Are they bored because their parents took away their videos games? The answer—or answers—turn out to be simpler than that……..”
That is the kind of writing that make this book a page-turner.

It is also testimony to Collard’s love of shooting woodpeckers, with a camera, not a gun. So many of them have brilliant coloration, especially of their heads, perhaps to make sure we notice how they use them. A woodpecker’s beak is a chisel and its head has a special tendon harness to keep it from giving itself a concussion. They peck to find food under bark and to carve out a cavity in a tree for a nest. And sometimes they peck to make noise—they drum! They drum to let other males know where they are and they drum to attract females. Who knew? Scientists record the drumming and play it back to lure woodpeckers for study. Surprise, a woodpecker will attack the loudspeakers near the human observer. Their drumming is intellectual property!

Woodpeckers: Drilling Holes & Bagging Bugs is a beautifully designed book with heavy, glossy stock pages that show off the spectacular photos of these birds feeding their young, catching flies on the fly, and slurping sap loaded with ants. Collard and his son, Braden obviously spent a lot of time working to get difficult-to-capture action photos and they share some of their hard-won out-takes with us as well.
​
The process of discovery, of being a naturalist, is shared with the reader. It is not quick or easy but it’s well-worth the investment. Publication is May 2018.

     Vicki Cobb

    *Award-winning author of more than 90 nonfiction books for children, mostly in science.
    *Former Contributor to the Huffington Post
    *Founder/President of iNK Think Tank, Inc.
    *Passionate advocate for the joy of learning for every child and teacher.


    Disclaimer: All opinions, typos, and grammatical errors are my own,  especially small word omissions which I often don't notice in my fervor.  

    RSS Feed

    ​​​​Archives

    October 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018

    ​Categories

    All
    Abuse
    Achievement Gap
    Adkins Jan
    Albee Sarah
    Anti Bullying
    Anti-bullying
    Art
    Author Driven Nonfiction
    Author-driven Nonfiction
    Authors On Call
    Biology
    Birds
    Black History
    BLC2018
    Book Review
    Child Abuse
    Children As Political Pawns
    Children's Nonfiction
    Citizenship
    Civics
    Civil Rights
    Class ACTS
    Climate Change
    Clinton Chelsea
    Collard III Sneed B.
    Common Core State Standards
    Conversation
    Coronavirus
    Costaldo Nancy F.
    Covid-19
    Critical Thinking
    Data-driven
    Definition
    Democracy
    Dewey John
    Dogs
    Dunphy Madeleine
    Ecology
    Education
    Educational Standards
    Electron Microscope
    Empowerment For Children
    Endangered Species
    Excellence
    Extinction
    Fact-checking
    Fleming Candace
    "flow"
    Galileo
    Girls' Education
    Global Warming
    Greenberg Jan
    Grit
    Gun Violence
    History
    History Of "school Reform"
    Home Libraries
    Hurricanes
    INK Database
    INK Database Of Books
    Insects
    Interactive Video Conferencing
    Isaac Sally
    Jeopardy Winner
    Learning
    Lesser Carolyn
    Leveled Reading
    Levinson Cynthia
    Lexiles
    Listening
    Literacy
    Literature
    Liu Eric
    March For Our Lives
    McClafferty Carla
    Mentor Texts
    Montgomery Heather L.
    Montgomery Sy
    Motivated Reasoning
    Motivation
    Munro Roxie
    Nathan Amy
    Nonfiction
    Nonfiction Minute
    Nonprofit And Education
    Opening Schools
    Patent Dorothy Hinshaw
    Pedagogy
    Picture Books
    Podcasts
    Primary Source
    Pringle Laurence
    Pundits Of The Pandemic
    Rap Music
    Reading
    Rules
    Rusch Elizabeth
    School Choice
    SchoolTube
    School Visits
    Science Experiments You Can Eat
    Science Teaching
    Semple Heidi E.Y.
    Social Skills
    Socrates
    Speaking
    Spring Fling
    Standardized Testing
    STEM
    Studies On Education
    Swanson Jennifer
    Teaching
    Technology And Children
    Thomas Peggy
    Trump
    Truth
    Voting
    Warren Andrea
    Washington George
    Weatherford Carole Boston
    Webinars
    Work With Us
    World War II
    Writing

    RSS Feed

Links

The Nonfiction Minute
​

​iNK Think Tank website

​Vicki Cobb's Kids' Fun Page

We Dare You Videos


Company

iNK Think Tank, Inc. is a nonprofit with the mission of using nonfiction children's literature in classrooms

Contact

vicki@inkthinktank.org
​

© 2019


© COPYRIGHT 2019. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.