The Young Scientist Series

Yesterday, my first package of goodies came in the mail. It is a book I ordered off Amazon called "Building Structures with Young Children" from The Young Scientist Series. Here is how it starts:

"Children's curiosity about the natural world, their 'inborn sense of wonder,' is a powerful catalyst for their work and play. With this curiosity and the need to make sense of the world, children are motivated to ask questions, explore how things work, and look closely at the natural world around them.
    But in today's world, children's experiences and their opportunities to do science are often limited--confined to frequently to the passive and secondhand experience of the television or video game. Modern technology also has hidden from view some of the basic ways in which things work. Our food comes from stores and few children have seen or engaged in growing and processing it. Toys that were once pushed and pulled or rolled now have hidden motors and batteries to drive them and a switch to turn them on and off." pg 2

The issues mentioned in the paragraph above have been going on for some time now. Even in my own childhood, I remember it being this way, except for the last point. I found the biggest learning environment was while I camped in the wilderness every summer for a few weeks with my family, frequent trail walking, and visits to the nearby marsh. I also remember learning a lot from the magic school bus. Was it easier to learn science in my parents generation? What about my grandparents time?

This reminds me of the movie "Babies" which came out a few years ago and showed the living conditions of four different babies growing up in four different countries and parts of the world. When I looked at the lack of nature I saw in the clips with the American baby, I was surprised and felt adverse to it. How do we bring back nature into the young child's experience? How do we teach them about life and science?

My Commonplace Book

A couple weeks ago, I started to keep a commonplace book. It is ideal for me at this time because I am planning to write a book. The great thing about a commonplace book is that it is a small storage space for quotes.

I just finished the book Waiting for Aphrodite: Journeys into the Time Before Bones by Sue Hubbell. It was an amazing depiction about a search for knowledge of different invertebrate animals. Each chapter was inspired by a different species: pill bugs, millipedes, spiders, sponges, bees, glowworms, and, of course, Aphrodite aculeata--whose scientific name is much more romantic than it's common name--a sea mouse.


Each time I read a quote or passage I liked, I put a sticky note above the first word. Throughout the entire book, I must have placed at least 30 of them. Now, I have started to write each quote on a cue card, with the title of the book and page number at the top. Then I will categorize them under themes.

Eventually, when I sit down to start writing this book, I will have a lot of notes of research to pull from and potential quotes to use.

Chalk Board Book

Hand made by Rachelle

The Hand Stitched Highlight

One place online that is awesome for artists is Etsy. One week, I read many blog posts about featured shops with artist bios who are successfully managing a creative career through the website.

This is how I happened upon Odelae by Erica Ekrem. She makes beautiful reincarnate hand stitched journals.

This is my inspiration.

Carrie Bow Cay

When I read this excerpt in Waiting for Aphrodite, the imagery captivated me. The author, Sue Hubbell, has a yearning to learn more about sponges. One animal that has been easily mistaken as a plant. She visits one of the few spongolisist in the world, Klaus Ruetzler, who works at the Smithsonian. He is also director of the Smithsonian's Caribbean Coral Reef Ecosystems Program, which has a research station at Carrie Bow Cay, an island off the coast of Belize. She was extended the invitation to visit him there and describes one of their outings.

Photo: National Geographic

Klaus, tanned, dressed only in bathing trunks, looked incredibly fit for his sixty years. He proposed that we snorkel out to a nearby reef so I could see not only his kingdom by the sea but the one under it, too. I had never snorkeled and was an indifferent swimmer, but I strapped on my freshly acquired mask and flippers and plunged in behind him. He turned into a merman and rapidly disappeared from my view. Eventually I caught up with him, but I was out of breath from the effort. Klaus dove down into the passages among the corals, being careful not to touch or harm them, and pointed out the sights. I watched, aghast, as bubbles of air floated up from the end of his snorkel underwater. I was trying to keep the water out of mine and it above water. I am no mermaid.

This first effort and a more leisurely underwater visit to another reef a few days later made me realize that the world underwater is the most foreign place I have ever visited. I'd seen pictures, of course, but pictures are static. Nothing had quite prepared me for the animality of this world or so challenged my notion of landscape. The rocks are animals. The trees are animals. The flowers are animals. Animals, all waving tentacles, pulsing and swaying as water moves through and around them. The meadows are algae in forms as varied as any prairie meadow. Bright fish are the spring warblers, and even more avian are the rays, flapping like birds or prey. Everything was in motion, going about the business of living, and I was a timid, craven  stranger. Klaus, darting about, taking delight in all, looked suspiciously at home. He took pity on my ineptitude and offered me a supporting hand, but I was overcome, not tired. We swam back to land.

Animals in the Attic

A few years ago, I was looking around Anthropologie with some friends. I spotted a book with animal painting prints. The pictures depicted animals doing human type behaviours. Right there and then, looking through the book, I became a BIG fan of the artist, Walton Ford.

Here is a video that he took of himself in his trade. He is describing how he gets details in the animals he paints and spends many hours at the natural history museum studying the animals textures.

Poem of Prokaryotes

I am reading the book Waiting for Aphrodite by Sue Hubbell which is a story about a search for knowledge about invertebrates. It has been compared to Walden's Pond. She includes a poem in her discussion about sponges, which is written by the biologist Ralph Lewin, who was a specialist in algae.

 In the Beginning

In the beginning the earth was all wet;

We hadn't got life--or ecology--yet.

There were lava and rocks--quite a lot of them both--

And oceans of nutrient Oparin broth.

But then there arose, at the edge of the sea,
Where sugars and organic acids were free,

A sort of blob with a kind of coat--

The earliest protero-prokaryote.

It grew and divided: it flourished and fed;

From puddle to puddle it rapidly spread

Until it deleted the ocean's store

And nary an acid was found any more.

Now, if one considered that terrible trend,

One might have predicted that that was the end--

But no! In some sunny wee lochan or slough

Appeared a new creature--we cannot say how.

By some strange transition that nobody knows,

A photosynthetic alga arose.

It grew and it flourished where nothing had been

Till much of the land was blue shades of green

And bubbles of oxygen started to rise

Throughout the world's oceans, and filled up the skies;

While, off in the antediluvian mists,

Arose a few species with heterocysts

Which, by a procedure which no-one can tell,

Fixed gaseous nitrogen into the cell.

As the gases turned on and the gases turned off

There emerged a respiring young heterotroph

It grew in its turn, and it lived and it throve,

Creating fine structure, genetics, and love,

And using its enzymes and oxygen-2,

Produced such fine creatures as coli and you.

This, then, is the story of life's evolution

From Oparin broth to the final solution.

So, prokaryologists, dinna forget:

We've come a long way since the world was all wet.

We owe a great deal--you can see from these notes--

To photosynthetical prokaryotes.

Biology in the Book

Loving this presentation and video by Steve Jenkins. He discusses how he is inspired to create a childrens book, by questions his children have asked/wondered. He goes on to make beautiful illustrations involving a sketch, cutting out pieces of fabric or textured paper to make a beautiful animal that is then scanned onto a computer.

I bought What Do You Do With a Tail Like This by Steve Jenkins for the boy I babysit for his birthday in the spring. He LOVES it and we read it most evenings I am there. He has just about memorized it. It introduces biology principles to children and how animals can use the same body part (tail, ears, mouth, etc.) to do different things. And it has beautiful illustrations :)

Pilot

This blog is inspired by the great Austin Kleon and his book Show Your Work--which has not yet come out and still in drafting. I was inspired by the principles he discussed as a guest on ChaseJarvisLIVE.

 This is one of the places I will be taking notes as a form of commonplace journal for things online :)