What are you reading?

I just took my kids to the library, and I was shocked by the sheer number of my family's favorite books that have been banned for one reason or another. Wow!

It got me thinking about what makes someone ban a book. Inappropriate language. Situations that are inappropriate for young adults (or tweens, or children--did you know that James and the Giant Peach is a banned book? Captain Underpants--some of my boys' favorite books--as well.) Even books for adults have been banned because someone out there doesn't like what the author had say.

But what they say matters.

Their stories open us up to subjects or language that might make us uncomfortable. They may confront us with ideas that make us question our thoughts and beliefs. But the operative word there is open.

Such stories open our eyes, hearts and minds. They show us a side of life that might be utterly different from our own. Just because it isn't our experience doesn't make it wrong. It's someone's experience, and it would behoove each and every one of us to learn more about experiences that are different from our own. How else can we show compassion to those who need it?

I had the good fortune to hear a talk by Chris Crutcher--one of the most banned YA authors around--at the Rocky Mountain SCBWI meeting. Chris has worked with kids whose lives have been anything but easy. And as he pointed out, those kids don't use nice language. So when he writes a novel about a kid in a similar type of situation, he uses true-to-life language, and he describes events that many of us might like to pretend don't exist.

But hiding our heads in the sand does nothing. Opening our hearts and minds to kids who live through those experiences does a lot.

What are you reading?

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Nurturing curiosity

Last weekend, I attended the Rocky Mountain SCBWI conference in Denver. It was a terrific meeting (such an enthusiastic, involved group!), and I had the opportunity to talk with agent Karen Grencik of Red Fox Literary, and editors Emily Clement of Arthur A. Levine Books and Sylvie Frank of Holiday House--gracious women, every one.

As a non-fiction writer, I paid close attention when the Common Core State Standards came up. Both Karen and Sylvie mentioned the importance of tying books to the Common Core. If a story has the potential to be used in the classroom, it will be much more likely to get published.

More and more, teachers are looking for books that allow them to "teach smarter, not harder," as a principal at a nearby school so eloquently put it. What does that mean? Teachers need books that teach literacy while providing curriculum-related content. Books that kill two birds with one stone, if you will.

(As an aside: If you teach science, Melissa Stewart has a terrific Pinterest board to help you find books to fit some of the Common Core standards.)

Teachers need to find ways to teach math and science simultaneously. Science and math are closely connected, and yet I get the sense that they're typically taught as completely distinct subjects. Do they have to be? Can't we interweave them, thereby increasing the amount of time available to dedicate to both?

For example, in a life cycles unit a class may order caterpillars. Watching them pupate and emerge as adult butterflies is a remarkable experience, but it can be so much more.

source

Order caterpillars that are smaller, those that have more time to grow. Then have the students measure them. Weigh them. Graph the change in size over time. Weigh plant material before it's given to the butterflies, then again a day later. How much weight was lost? Was the same amount gained by the caterpillars? Why or why not? If the plants lost more weight than the caterpillars gained, where could the rest have gone?

Think you don't have enough science time to extend the life cycles unit? That's the beauty of "teaching smarter"--you can squeeze science into the daily math routine. And numbers are so much more interesting when they mean something.

I think--or rather hope--that the Common Core will encourage just this kind of cross-over in the classroom. After meeting with the principal mentioned above, and one of the teachers at her school, I strongly believe that we can again foster a love of science--and math--by returning to a hands-on approach and blurring the lines between subjects.

Math is fun and cool when it has real-life application. And science is all about curiosity--after all, what is a scientist but a kid who never stopped asking "Why?" 

The possibilities for exploration and discovery, critical thinking and inquiry-based learning are endless if we can just start to see the curriculum in a new way. 

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Looking for a few good teachers!

Hey teachers! Want to get your students out of the classroom? Connect them with the critters in their own neighborhood? Give them the tools they need to work toward positive change? All while working toward meeting National Science Education Standards?

I'm looking for a few adventurous elementary/middle school teachers who would like to incorporate some hands-on, inquiry-based activities into their classroom curriculum.

The activities in question address the following National Science Education Standards:

• characteristics of organisms 
• organisms and environments 
• regulation and behavior 
• populations and ecosystems 
• diversity and adaptations of organisms

Curious? Interested? Send me an email at alison [at] apstevens [dot] com to find out more! (If you're not a teacher, but you know someone who is, please pass this along!)

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Look who made the centerfold!

Guess who made the centerfold of Highlights for Children? Yes, me! (Get your mind out of the gutter, it's not that kind of centerfold; I write for children, people.)

Highlights for Children (Sept. 2012) used with permission.
Image copyright Michael Cameron, NOAA.

I can't show you the whole thing, but see that by-line? Off to the right there are staples (well, you can't see them, and since my son absconded with the magazine, I can't retake the image, but trust me, there are staples). Definitely staples... as in the staples that hold everything together and signify the center of the magazine. The staples that cause a magazine to fall open more often to the center spread than any other page (once the little subscription card thingies are torn out).

I am so, so thrilled to have my first Highlights article "drop" (I'm trying to pick up the lingo; still not sure I'm using it right). Doesn't that sound as though stacks upon stacks of the magazine, balanced precariously upon a hinged platform, suddenly find themselves in free-fall as the platform falls away? I imagine they plummet down long, windy Willy Wonka's factory-like chutes that divide and subdivide until each magazine plops into a kid's mailbox.

The kids race out to collect the mail, jump up and down when they see that lovely red Highlights banner, and speed inside to read it from cover to cover. Or maybe that's just my kids. And me. Not now (well, yes, now, but not ONLY now). I did it back when I was a kid, too. Highlights was my favorite magazine, and I never dreamed I would be published in it (well I did, but not way back then).

So that's my big news for the week. I'm still all smiley about it, and absolutely in love with the photos they chose, all taken by a friend of mine, Michael Cameron of the NOAA National Marine Mammals Laboratory Polar Ecosystems Program. The man's got some talent, no?

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