There’s a great new book out called Octopuses! Strange and Wonderful. It is by Laurence Pringle and is illustrated by Meryl Henderson. Together they present an attractive, accurate, and informative book about octopuses and other mollusks as well. The book would be an engaging read-aloud for younger elementary children and a good research material for upper elementary. I liked the information about how mollusks’ bodies are structured and how they work. Obviously this author researches his subjects carefully, and he knows how to tell a good story as well.
When I looked on Laurence Pringle’s website, I discovered that he has produced many highly rated children’s science books. The Strange and Wonderful series includes books on scorpions, cicadas, alligators and crocodiles, snakes, bats, and sharks. I was familiar with another high quality book by this author, A Dragon in the Sky: The Story of a Green Darner Dragonfly, published in 2001. I’m not sure how I missed the Strange and Wonderful series, but I will certainly seek it out now.
Another volume I have acquired lately is Animal Earth: The Amazing Diversity of Living Creatures by Ross Piper. It has many uses, from providing gorgeous illustrations of all sorts of animals to giving detailed biology for secondary student research. When I say all sorts of animals, I mean that the book covers all of the 34 phyla currently recognized in the animal kingdom. There is a chapter on animal lineages that helps one understand the current arrangement of those phyla on evolutionary trees (cladograms). The book is structured to follow the cladogram in the contents page. After the first branches of animals, the section on bilaterial animals starts with deuterostomes, and so the chordates, including us, are near the front of the book. Then it covers the protostomes, starting with the molting animals, including arthropods and nematodes. The clade called lophotrochozoa comes next, with annelids, mollusks, flatworms, and rotifers. The order alone will stimulate thought.
I found What on Earth?: 100 of Our Planet’s Most Amazing New Species while I was browsing in a bookstore. I highly recommend spending some time going through the stacks at bookstores, particularly those with a science section. I find things there that I missed on Amazon. This little book by Quentin Wheeler and Sara Pennak will likely stimulate conversations and research about a wide range of life. The 100 species are primarily animals, but fungi, plants, and a few protists also appear. There are even two bacteria. A feast for curiosity indeed.
Children love to get their hands on real things and do experiments, and teachers love clear instructions and easy-to-find materials for those experiments. I have two new books that will be valuable for both. The act of making something for oneself is an important one that I think is too rare in our everyday lives, so I appreciate books that help children use their hands and minds to do science activities and learn about how the world works.
The first is a new edition of a book by the master science educator, Vicki Cobb. The title is We Dare You! The 2014 edition has a special feature, videos of many of the experiments online, which you can find at http://www.vickicobb.com/vickisvideolinks.html . You can even contribute your own videos of the activities to the website. Many of these activities have been published before, but it is helpful to have so many useful challenges for children collected in one volume. I would save the videos until children have done the activity for themselves, but seeing other children do the activity could be inspiring.
The second book is Junk Drawer Physics: 50 Awesome Experiments That Don’t Cost a Thing by Bobby Mercer, published in 2014. While the subtitle may exaggerate the frugality of these experiments, it is true that many of the materials come from a recycling bin. Some of the constructs are amazing simple. I didn’t know that you can make a Cartesian diver with a ketchup packet. I would give children the instructions, but hold the explanations until they have tried the activity. You will want to screen the activities for the classroom rather than just putting out the book so that children won’t find out how to set steel wool on fire with a 9-volt battery before you have prepared a safe environment. Yes, some of these activities will require special supervision, and there are a few you may not want in your classroom, but children can do most of them easily and safely by themselves. They will certainly learn while they are having fun.
These books look great for building children’s reading skills. Being able to read instructions and follow them is a skill well worth developing. If I were putting the activities in a classroom, I would probably give children the instructions to read, and leave the explanation of what happens for later. After children have tried the activity and recorded their findings, they could read the “Insider Information” section of We Dare You! or “The Science Behind It” section of Junk Drawer Physics , which tells about the science behind the happenings. They are much more likely to record what they actually observe if they don’t know what they are supposed to see. They are also more likely to take in information about the science principles after they have experienced the phenomena.
As we study the diversity of life, the many adaptations of animals take center stage. For the record, an adaptation is a feature of an organism that helps it survive and reproduce in its environment. The experiments of evolution have shaped animals for their particular way of making a living. Knowing about adaptations helps children understand the differences in the branches of life. It can also help them see convergent evolution, that confounding phenomenon that shapes animals (or plants, for that matter) that live with the same environmental challenges to look similar. After all, there is only one shape that works well for large, fast-moving predators that live in water, and that is a streamlined shape like that of tuna, dolphins, or ichthyosaurs. In the case of convergent evolution, look-alikes are not relatives. In many other cases, common features show a shared ancestry. It's a good thing we have DNA studies to help sort it all out.
I have several great children’s books on adaptations. The first two are for 5-9 year-olds, although older children could likely learn from a careful look at them. Best Foot Forward: Exploring Feet, Flippers, and Claws by Ingo Arndt was translated from German to English and published in 2013. It has photos of the bottom of a foot and the question “Whose foot is this?” On the following page there is a photo of the animal to which the foot belongs, along with photos of other animal feet that move in the same environment. There are feet that walk, feet that climb, etc. The photos are excellent, and children will likely find them engaging.
Steve Jenkins and Robin Page produced Creature Features: 25 Animals Explain Why They Look the Way They Do in 2014. The title says it all, and they did it in great style. Because the illustrations show only one view – looking straight at the animal’s face, you may wish to provide children with resources with other images that show more of the animals. This book should certainly help children realize that animals look the way they do for a reason. The term “adaptations” doesn’t appear in the text, but the introduction says this about the features of the animals – “In some way they help these animals survive.” The Amazon page for this book has some great information about how the artwork was created.
Animal Tongues by Dawn Cusick was published in 2009, and it does an excellent job of introducing the variety of animal tongues and their functions. The book is attractive and fun to read. It would likely work for all levels of elementary, perhaps as a read-aloud for the youngest ones. The author has two new books that I haven’t seen, but which also sound good. They were published by the National Wildlife Federation last fall. The titles are Animals that Make Me Say Wow! and Animals that Make Me Say Ouch!
As we strive to reconnect children with nature, learning the names of plants can be a valuable first step. It certainly is an excellent measure to fight plant blindness, that malady that hides the marvelous details and identities of plants. All plants that children encounter are good subjects for learning names, whether the plant is a cut flower, a garden vegetable, a wildflower, or a weed.
Spring is coming extra early to the Willamette Valley, and although I realize that is not the case in most of the US, it is never too early to start thinking about spring and the opportunities for botany studies it presents. The crocuses are blooming here, as well as snowdrops and violets. When spring comes to your school, will the children know the names of the flowers that appear?
My “Study Starter Cards for Early Spring Flowers” can help your children start learning about the local flowers in the US, especially in moderate climates. This material is a print-it-yourself file that has half-page sized cards for 20 flowers and four full pages on early blooming trees. The trees are red maple, bigleaf maple, alder, and hazelnut, all of which have inconspicuous flowers. The flowers in this set include bulbs, perennials, and shrubs.
These cards have more than just the common and scientific names of the flowers. That information is enough for beginners, but elementary children are able to learn more. These and older children need names that will open doors to further learning.The cards include the family, order, and major branches of the angiosperms to which the plant belongs.
The major branches of the angiosperms are the magnoliids, the monocots, and the eudicots. The largest branch, the eudicots, has several branches including the asterids and the fabids. The names of these branches are not capitalized, nor do they carry a rank such as order or class. This is the new world of plant classification, the phylogenetic system that is currently used by botanists. With a little practice, it isn’t hard to learn or understand. My book, Kingdoms of Life Connected can help you. In case you are wondering, the former dicots included eudicots and magnoliids, which are two different lineages. "Eudicots" means "the true dicots."
The photo shows crocuses that were blooming in my garden early last March. They are at about the same stage this year at the end of January. Yes, the weather is strange, as usual. Enjoy your early spring plants, whenever they come.
When you are looking for real living things to study and observe in your outdoor environment, the birds of your area can be good subjects even in the middle of winter. Birds are still called class Aves by some scientists, but it is well accepted that they are a branch of the theropod dinosaurs, so they are nested within the Class Reptilia. They are related to the maniraptors, an extinct lineage of small, feathered dinosaurs. The birds that are alive now – the extant or modern birds – belong to the lineage Neornithes. But enough of long names. The real excitement is actually watching birds as they go about their lives.
Look Up! Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard by Annette Le Blanc Cate (2013) is a great resource for launching bird studies. This book was the prize-winner in the 2014 book awards from Science Books and Films (SB&F). See http://www.aaas.org/news/2014-aaassubaru-sbf-prizes-celebrate-fieldwork-and-citizen-science . The book encourages children to observe birds and to sketch them. It is illustrated in cartoon style, with the birds making many human-type comments, but elementary children are not likely to confuse the messages from the birds in this book with real bird communications. They will likely find it amusing and engaging, and hopefully it will inspire them to see and learn more about their local birds.
If you want a more serious look at bird vocalizations, try Bird Talk: What Birds are Saying and Why by Lita Judge (2012). This looks like a good lower elementary read, and it has further information about the bird species shown.
Of course you will need a good field guide to birds so that children can identify the birds they observe. There are many excellent ones available. For the whole US, I like The Sibley Guide to Birds by David Allen Sibley (2000). You may find it useful to have a more local guide as well because it reduces children’s (and adults’) frustration when they are trying to identify a bird they have seen. For a children’s book about a man who pioneered modern field guides, see For the Birds: The Life of Roger Tory Petersen by Peggy Thomas and Laura Jacques.
Children may wish to add their observations to a classroom record, a field guide to their local birds. Will they see the same birds each year? Will the birds change throughout the year? To answer these questions, children will have to observe, identify, record, and see what everyone finds. Happy birding!
Late January 3rd (Mountain and Pacific Time zones) or early January 4th (Eastern and Central time zones) the Earth passed through its perihelion, the point in its orbit that it is closest to the Sun. I was looking for information about Earth’s perihelion, and I was surprised to find that the day of perihelion and the actual distance the Earth is from the Sun vary quite a bit. The day falls anywhere from January 2 to January 5. The actual distance from the Sun varies by about 21,000 km, which is about 1 2/3 the Earth’s diameter.
It seems that our Moon and, to a small extent, our neighboring planets cause the Earth’s orbit to vary a little bit. While 21,000 km (about 13,000 miles) may not seem like a short distance, compare it to the average diameter of the Earth’s orbit, 149,600,000 km or 93,000,000 miles. The point of me telling you this is not to shower you with numbers, but rather to help you see in your imagination that the Earth moves in a slightly variable path, not a perfectly stable ellipse.
Another astronomical event for this time of year is the latest sunrise. The date is variable, depending on latitude. In Key West, Florida, the latest sunrise occurs on about January 14. In Denver, Colorado, it is about January 5, and in Anchorage, Alaska, the sunrise turns around after December 26. As the sunrise moves earlier, our Northern Hemisphere days lengthen more noticeably. If you want to find the exact date for your location, you can use the US Naval Observatory website, http://aa.usno.navy.mil/data/docs/RS_OneYear.php . You can also get a table of the duration of daylight from this site. Data is available for the whole world, so you can see how days are shortening now in the Southern Hemisphere as well.
I’ve made a few changes to my Tree of Life and have new files available for free download. The changes are in the prokaryotes and protists. The three true kingdoms, the plants, animals, and fungi are still the same. These changes aren’t large, but they make the chart more accurate and useful.
Perhaps I should start by stating current rules on what constitutes a kingdom. Like any other lineage of life, a kingdom is an ancestor and all of its descendants. Organisms that are not descendants of that ancestor are excluded. That is why the Five Kingdom classification is no longer used. Two of those kingdoms, Monera and Protista, are not valid.
On my prokaryote chart, the only change is in the title. I’ve changed “Kingdom Monera” to “formerly Kingdom Monera” and reduced the font size. I wanted put stronger emphasis on the fact that Kingdom Monera is obsolete. It is no longer accepted by biologists because the two branches, bacteria and archaea, are tremendously different at the cell level. While they may have shared an ancestor very long ago, that ancestor would be the ancestor of all life, not just prokaryotic life.
On my protist chart, I changed both the title and the rhizaria branch. Biologists have good evidence that the rhizaria lineage, the stramenopile lineage, and the alveolate lineage shared a common ancestor more recently than the common ancestor of eukaryotes. The lineage is called SAR, an abbreviation for stramenopile, alveolate, and rhizaria. On the chart, I moved the base of the rhizaria lineage up onto the chromalveolate branch (which symbolizes the common ancestors of stramenopiles and aveolates) rather than showing the rhizaria as equally related to all the bikonts.
There are many uncertainties still in the protists, which are not a kingdom because they exclude the plants, animals and fungi. For convenience biologists group these eukaryotes into the informal group we call protists. There is an overwhelming amount of variety in this hodge-podge of life. When you introduce children to the protists, it is good to tell them that the branches on the chart are just the main branches, the ones with many known members. There are lots of other smaller branches as well. New protists are still being discovered and many that we have known of for years are yet to be studied enough to place them on the Tree of Life.
The Tree of Life gives a good framework for children to use as they address further diversity of life. It’s good to remind them that each of the main branches on the chart holds many other lineages, and life is always surprising us with its endless experiments. No chart will be valid for decades, at least not until we have studied many more organisms and determined configurations of many more lineages.
Happy explorations in life. You can use the comments to ask questions about these changes.
Priscilla
In the Northern Hemisphere, poinsettias are now available in plant nurseries. These plants have become a part of winter holiday traditions, so it is likely that children will see them. When poinsettias appear in classrooms, you have an opportunity to introduce children to the euphorbia family and its unusual flowers.
Don’t worry about these attractive plants being poisonous. That myth has been debunked. The sap of this plant, like other members of the euphorbia family, is irritating to skin and eyes, but the plant is no great hazard in the classroom. They are no more than a mild irritant to cats and dogs. People that have an allergy to natural latex rubber could have an allergic reaction to the sap, as natural rubber comes from another member of the euphorbia family, the rubber tree, Hevea brasiliensis.
I have written a booklet for children that shows how poinsettias are grown and gives the botanical details of their bracts and flowers. It is available as a print-it-yourself file on the Big Picture Science website. I took the photos a few years ago at a small greenhouse near Conifer, Colorado. In order to trigger the plants to form flowers, they must have a dark period at night. Even a little light exposure will stop the production of buds. The greenhouse I visited was well away from the pollution of city lights.
The length of the darkness increases as days become shorter in the fall, and that is what triggers poinsettias to flower. In their native climate in Mexico and Central America, the length of darkness is only about 13 hours maximum, so flowering doesn’t require a long period of darkness. The darkness needs to be complete, however.
The brightly colored bracts are modified leaves. The flowers are in the yellow, cup-like structures in the center of the bracts. They have no petals, and children will be able to see the flowers’ details more clearly with a magnifying glass. My booklet, The Story of Poinsettias at TaTonka Farms, will help you figure out the puzzle of the flowers' structure.
Now you can purchase a file for printing 13 posters that illustrate the levels of life’s structural organization. The levels are the biosphere, biomes, ecosystems, biological communities, populations, individual organisms, organ systems, organs and tissues, cells, organelles, macromolecules, small building block molecules, and atoms.
This framework is an important part of life science literacy that is seldom shown all at once, and children will benefit from seeing it. My book, From the Biosphere to Atoms: A Teacher’s Guide to the Organization of the Living World, has basic concepts and lessons that go with each level of organization. It is available both as a printed book and as an “e-book,” a PDF file of the book that you can view on your computer or print for yourself.
You may notice a few changes on the new PDF of the posters. The talented artist who colored the posters made the mitochondria green, and it would have been difficult to have her redo that color at the time the originals were colored. Recently I figured out how to use Photoshop to overlay a different color, so now the mitochondria are orange-toned, better in my opinion for an organelle that deals in energy and less likely to be confused with chloroplasts.
We have a few of the printed posters still available, but instead of reprinting it, I decided to make the file available for schools to print their own. When a poster gets something spilled on it, gets torn or damaged, or just wears out, you can reprint it for your classroom. You can print the file at full scale on 11” X 14” cardstock or shrink it to a smaller size. The text is large enough to read when the posters are printed on 8.5” X 11” (letter-sized) paper. Please note that the copyright gives you permission to print the file for your classroom and for two more classrooms in the same school. Please ask others to purchase their own file for printing and please do not share the file.
Do you use these posters? How do children react to them? I would enjoy hearing about your experiences with this material.
A note to international buyers: These posters show North American biomes, ecosystem, and biological community. The organisms are a Ponderosa pine tree and a native squirrel. You may wish to add illustrations of your local ecosystem and organisms. The organ is a trachea from the respiratory system of the squirrel, but is similar in appearance to that of most mammals. The tissues, cells, molecules, and atoms posters are useful anywhere. Montessori Downunder in New Zealand has a black and white set of these posters that show the biosphere centered on the Southern Hemisphere and native New Zealand marine mammals.
Priscilla Spears
Big Picture Science now sells the Animal Kingdom Chart from InPrint for Children. Our stock is the latest printing of this chart, so it has new features. Carolyn Jones Spearman, who is the owner and designer of InPrint for Children, is meticulous in her images and designs. Each time she reprints this chart, she consults me for the latest updates.
With the high rate of change in life science, fueled by new DNA information and Tree-of-Life paradigms, there has been something to change on each printing. On this one, the material is a laminated sheet that lies flat. The color scheme is refined, and there are two new labels placed near the bottom to show the animals that are on the protostome and deuterostome branches of life. These branches are shown on my Tree-of-Life diagram for the animal kingdom.
If you are not familiar with these branches, they are explained in my book, Kingdoms of Life Connected. Briefly, the protostome (“mouth first”) lineage includes mollusks, annelids, arthropods, and roundworms. The deuterostome (“mouth second”) lineage includes echinoderms and chordates. One interesting difference between these two lineages is that identical twins are only possible in the deuterostomes. Their fertilized eggs keep the ability to develop into many tissues through several cell divisions, whereas the protostome cells specialize early. The deuterostome embryos can be divided in half and go on to form two individuals. The protostome embryos die if they are divided in half.
InPrint for Children’s Animal Kingdom Chart includes color cards to place on the chart. Each one illustrates an animal and has information about it on the back. There is a subtle clue to the animal’s environment in the shading behind the animal’s image. If the shading is blue, the animal is aquatic. If it is green, the animal is terrestrial, and if it is pinkish, the animal is a parasite.
This animal kingdom chart provides further experience for children, after they have seen the place of the animal kingdom in the Tree of Life, and after they have an introduction to the major branches of the animal kingdom. Those introductions can be done with my Tree-of-Life charts. The advantage of the chart from InPrint for Children is that it gives children more practice and introduces them to more members of the lineages of animals. The grouping of phyla on the chart reflects the branches on the Tree of Life. For instance, the arthropods and the roundworms, members of the molting animal lineage (edysozoa) are placed side-by-side with a wider margin between them and other branches of animals.
The InPrint for Children chart clarifies the confusion between chordates and vertebrates. Some Montessori materials show non-chordates and chordates rather than invertebrates and vertebrates. Those two groupings are not the same. The tunicates and lancelets are invertebrate chordates. The line on the bottom of the chart shows which animals are vertebrates and which are not.
There is a lot to learn by working with this chart. I hope you and your children find it an inspiring entrance into study of the animals.
There’s a great new book out called Octopuses! Strange and Wonderful. It is by Laurence Pringle and is illustrated by Meryl Henderson. Together they present an attractive, accurate, and informative book about octopuses and other mollusks as well. The book would be an engaging read-aloud for younger elementary children and a good research material for upper elementary. I liked the information about how mollusks’ bodies are structured and how they work. Obviously this author researches his subjects carefully, and he knows how to tell a good story as well.
Another volume I have acquired lately is Animal Earth: The Amazing Diversity of Living Creatures by Ross Piper. It has many uses, from providing gorgeous illustrations of all sorts of animals to giving detailed biology for secondary student research. When I say all sorts of animals, I mean that the book covers all of the 34 phyla currently recognized in the animal kingdom. There is a chapter on animal lineages that helps one understand the current arrangement of those phyla on evolutionary trees (cladograms). The book is structured to follow the cladogram in the contents page. After the first branches of animals, the section on bilaterial animals starts with deuterostomes, and so the chordates, including us, are near the front of the book. Then it covers the protostomes, starting with the molting animals, including arthropods and nematodes. The clade called lophotrochozoa comes next, with annelids, mollusks, flatworms, and rotifers. The order alone will stimulate thought.
I found What on Earth?: 100 of Our Planet’s Most Amazing New Species while I was browsing in a bookstore. I highly recommend spending some time going through the stacks at bookstores, particularly those with a science section. I find things there that I missed on Amazon. This little book by Quentin Wheeler and Sara Pennak will likely stimulate conversations and research about a wide range of life. The 100 species are primarily animals, but fungi, plants, and a few protists also appear. There are even two bacteria. A feast for curiosity indeed.
The first is a new edition of a book by the master science educator, Vicki Cobb. The title is We Dare You! The 2014 edition has a special feature, videos of many of the experiments online, which you can find at 
The second book is Junk Drawer Physics: 50 Awesome Experiments That Don’t Cost a Thing by Bobby Mercer, published in 2014. While the subtitle may exaggerate the frugality of these experiments, it is true that many of the materials come from a recycling bin. Some of the constructs are amazing simple. I didn’t know that you can make a Cartesian diver with a ketchup packet. I would give children the instructions, but hold the explanations until they have tried the activity. You will want to screen the activities for the classroom rather than just putting out the book so that children won’t find out how to set steel wool on fire with a 9-volt battery before you have prepared a safe environment. Yes, some of these activities will require special supervision, and there are a few you may not want in your classroom, but children can do most of them easily and safely by themselves. They will certainly learn while they are having fun.
I have several great children’s books on adaptations. The first two are for 5-9 year-olds, although older children could likely learn from a careful look at them. Best Foot Forward: Exploring Feet, Flippers, and Claws by Ingo Arndt was translated from German to English and published in 2013. It has photos of the bottom of a foot and the question “Whose foot is this?” On the following page there is a photo of the animal to which the foot belongs, along with photos of other animal feet that move in the same environment. There are feet that walk, feet that climb, etc. The photos are excellent, and children will likely find them engaging.
Steve Jenkins and Robin Page produced Creature Features: 25 Animals Explain Why They Look the Way They Do in 2014. The title says it all, and they did it in great style. Because the illustrations show only one view – looking straight at the animal’s face, you may wish to provide children with resources with other images that show more of the animals. This book should certainly help children realize that animals look the way they do for a reason. The term “adaptations” doesn’t appear in the text, but the introduction says this about the features of the animals – “In some way they help these animals survive.” The Amazon page for this book has some great information about how the artwork was created.
Animal Tongues by Dawn Cusick was published in 2009, and it does an excellent job of introducing the variety of animal tongues and their functions. The book is attractive and fun to read. It would likely work for all levels of elementary, perhaps as a read-aloud for the youngest ones. The author has two new books that I haven’t seen, but which also sound good. They were published by the National Wildlife Federation last fall. The titles are Animals that Make Me Say Wow! and Animals that Make Me Say Ouch!
Look Up! Bird-Watching in Your Own Backyard by Annette Le Blanc Cate (2013) is a great resource for launching bird studies. This book was the prize-winner in the 2014 book awards from Science Books and Films (SB&F). See 
If you want a more serious look at bird vocalizations, try Bird Talk: What Birds are Saying and Why by Lita Judge (2012). This looks like a good lower elementary read, and it has further information about the bird species shown.
Now you can purchase a file for printing 13 posters that illustrate the levels of life’s structural organization. The levels are the biosphere, biomes, ecosystems, biological communities, populations, individual organisms, organ systems, organs and tissues, cells, organelles, macromolecules, small building block molecules, and atoms.
Big Picture Science now sells the Animal Kingdom Chart from InPrint for Children. Our stock is the latest printing of this chart, so it has new features. Carolyn Jones Spearman, who is the owner and designer of InPrint for Children, is meticulous in her images and designs. Each time she reprints this chart, she consults me for the latest updates.