Blogs about science books for children

It was a pleasant surprise to find this review of The Shocking Truth about Energy on the blog Simply Science: Using books for easy science lessons. I certainly can’t argue with this quote:

“The publisher says the book is for younger audiences, but I loved it and can see it read by older kids, too. It is succinct and complete, and a wonderful resource. I’d love to see it in every library in this energy-conscious age.”

It is funny how publishers put an age range on books that isn’t necessarily that accurate. It may have something to do with how they organize their catalog or some other arcane reason. Guess I should ask one of these days.

Here is an activity page for this book. Enjoy!

A handy list of my math picture books

Since starting to “tweet” I can see how useful it is to create blog posts about a very specific topic. The “math phobia” #mathchat last week also was an inspiration. Without further ado, here are my math picture books with a summary and a link to each book’s page on my web site:

Follow the Money!

George the quarter starts at the mint, becomes change in a cash register, is used to buy a balloon, falls out of a pocket, is saved in a piggy bank, and has many other adventures as he travels through the economy.

Fraction Action

Miss Prime and her students learn about fractions in five short stories, starting with simple geometric shapes and objects such as half a glass of milk. Scenarios such as how to divide food evenly for a lunch or how far to discount lemonade for sale in wintertime show how fractions are used in real life.

The Great Graph Contest

Who is the best at making graphs, Gonk the toad or Beezy the lizard? With Chester the snail as judge, they set about collecting data and making bar graphs, pie charts, Venn diagrams, and quantity graphs. Rocks, bathing suit patterns, cookies, and flowers are some of the items that wind up being grouped and displayed in colorful visual form.

It’s Probably Penny

Lisa’s dog Penny is the focus of her homework assignment about probability. Lisa predicts the likelihood of events such as whether Penny will see a shark, dig up a buried treasure, or turn into a cat, then records the actual results.

Mapping Penny’s World
This time Lisa needs to make maps, so she starts with a floor plan of her room, complete with symbols, a key, a compass rose, and a scale. Other maps include Penny’s treasures, her favorite places, and a trip around the world Penny might take some day.

Measuring Penny

Lisa needs to measure something for her homework, so she chooses her dog Penny and a few of her doggie friends at the park. Lisa uses both standard and nonstandard units to measure tails, paws, noses, as well as how high the dogs can jump and many other characteristics.

 Missing Math: A Number Mystery

When a town’s numbers vanish one day, everyone discovers how difficult a world without math would be. If nobody can count, add, subtract, make phone calls, use a computer, or buy anything then life becomes impossible, so hopefully a local detective can crack the case.

Mission Addition

Miss Prime explains the basics of addition, then her students venture out into the world to add up scores, tally up their pets, sell things at a garage sale, and write word problems.

The Monster Money Book

When a young monster and a girl want to join The Monster Club, they must earn money to pay dues, help add up the group funds, and figure out what to spend it on.

Seeing Symmetry is a concept book with dozens of examples of line and rotational symmetry. From horses to hubcaps and bugs to boots, symmetry is all around us!

Subtraction Action
In seven short stories, Miss Prime’s students watch a magic show, put on a play, run an obstacle course, and try to win a prize by making things disappear.

2 X 2 = BOO! A Set of Spooky Multiplication Stories

In six short stories, silly Halloween characters such as ghosts, black cats, bats, and skeletons demonstrate the multiplication facts from 0 X 0 = 0 all the way to 5 X 5 = 25.

Whew, have I really made 12 math books?

Twitter hashtags about children’s books, writing, publishing, and education

We can officially add Twitter to the list of Things-I-Said-I’d-Never-Do-But-Now-I-Am. Since I’ve only been tweeting for a couple of weeks, it may be premature to compile this list, but what the heck. 

Hashtags are the way people index their tweets, which allows anyone searching on a hashtag to find info about, say #ebooks or #elemed (elementary education) or #math. Here’s an example from fellow I.N.K. blogger, Vicki Cobb:

"Before you cobble together free reading material for your kids, read this: http://bit.ly/b02i0o #education #edweeklive #literacy."

I’m not sure what #edweeklive is, will have to check it out, might be a conference. The shortened URLs are obtained at bit.ly or some other service for free. If there are tweet buttons on the blog, the post's URL is automatically shortened for the tweet.

By the way, I’m tweeting under @LoreenLeedy, so hope to see you there. The tags in bold are the ones I use the most…without any further ado, here are the tags:

#amediting        from people who are editing
#amwriting        from people who are writing
#arted               art education
#artsed             arts education
#arteacher
#askagent         agent questions and answers
#author
#authors
#bio
#bookapps        book-like apps for iPad, Android, etc.
#childrensbooks
#classroom
#dads
#ece               early childhood education
#editing
#ebooks
#edapp           educational app
#edchat
#edtech          education technology
#education
#edubk            books about teaching
#elemchat     
#elemed          elementary education
#elementary
#ellchat           english language learners
#ePrdctn         electronic production (e.g. book designers)
#esl                 english as a second language
#fictionfriday
#hsc                homeschool

#homeschool
#iamwriting
#illustration
#innochat         innovation

#journchat 
#kedu               kindergarten education
#kidlit              children’s literature

#kidlitchat
#kidlitPRchat   marketing children's books
#kids
#kidsapps
#kidsbooks
#lessonplans
#library
#librarians

#litchat
#literacy
#math
#maths
#mathchat
#mathteachers
#mglitchat          middle grade literature chat
#mlearning         mobile device learning, e.g. phones, tablets, etc.

#moms
#nanowrimo       national novel writing month
#NFforKids        nonfiction for kids
#nonfiction
#novels
#novelists
#ntchat               new teacher chat
#pblit                  picture book literature

#pblitchat           picture book literature chat
#picturebooks
#poem
#poet
#poets
#poetry
#preschool

#printdesign
#pubtip                publication tips
#publishing
#SCBWI              re the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrator
#science
#scifi

#scifichat

#scribechat
#selfpublishing
#storyappchat     chat for book app authors, illustrators, developers, and users

#storycraft
#teacher
#teachpreschool
#titletalk             librarians talking about specific book titles

#tlchat                teacher-librarians

#webfic              web fiction
#weblit               web literature
#wip                   work in progress

#writechat
#writegoal
#writequote       quotations about writing
#writer
#writers
#writetip            writing tip
#writing
#writingtips        writing advice
#wrotetoday
#yalitchat          young adult literature chat
#ya

Tags that end with -chat are discussions held at a scheduled time such as once a week, but some people seem to put them on tweets at any time.

My source for some of these is here: Daily Writing Tips and here: Cybraryman. The rest I cribbed from reading various tweets, of course.

[Update Feb. 20, 2012: Added and deleted some tags. Suggestions are welcome!]

This post is such a joke

[This article is adapted from one originally posted on I.N.K. (Interesting Nonfiction for Kids) on October 15, 2008. At the time, I was doing research for what became this year’s Fall book, My Teacher is a Dinosaur. Only one of these jokes ended up in the book as it turned out. Maybe there needs to be a sequel...!]


For some odd reason I recently began writing riddles and jokes about invertebrates, among other creatures:

Q. Why are anemones so popular?
A. The anemone of my anemone is my friend.

Q. Why are tubeworms so shy?
A. They‘re introvertebrates.

Time travel came up... temporally, at least:
Q. What’s the most common way to time travel?
A. Throwing the alarm clock at the wall!

Q. Why is time travel so confusing?
A. I already told you that next week!

Astronomy tried to take on a starring role:

Q. What do you call a mean meteor?
A. A nasteroid!

Q. How does the Earth say good-bye to the Moon?
A. Later, crater!

If there‘s an award for awful jokes, I hope to win it. It’s been about twenty years since I last grappled with similar material, and then to do just the illustrations for David Adler’s The Dinosaur Princess. So, how do you write a riddle or joke, anyway? Here's one method:

1. Choose a subject, let‘s say mammoths. List words that describe how they looked, their behavior, their habitat, and so on.
hairy trunk trumpet tusk snow ice huge big bones big teeth, etc.

2. Think of rhymes, similar-sounding words, and/or words that contain the word:
HAIRY scary contrary fairy canary very necessary Larry
SNOW go know no slow slowpoke snowflake
TRUNK junk chunk clunk skunk truncated

3. Use these ideas to write a rhyming, nonsensical, or goofy possible answer:a scary hairy fairy
a snowpoke

4. Make up a question that gives a hint of the answer:

Q. Why were baby mammoths afraid of losing a tusk?
A. Because of their hairy scary tooth fairy!

Q. How fast did mammoths walk in winter?
A. They were snowpokes!

5. Try variations on classic joke formulas:

Q. How many mammoths did it take to change a light bulb?
A. None because there were no lamps in the Ice Age!

Wording the question and answer carefully will maximize the effect. For a real challenge, once you get good at writing regular riddles, try incorporating one into a poem or limerick. (I’d show a sample, but have to save them for the book.)

One book for kids about how they can write their own jokes is Funny You Should Ask: How to Make Up Jokes and Riddles with Wordplay by Marvin Terban. He has written over thirty books for kids about various types of wordplay.
I ran across This Book is a Joke by Holly Kowitt in a used book store, and find it especially funny for some reason. It covers a ton of topics from pets to school lunches to the eight types of classmates. Mostly text, it does contain a few delightfully goofy cartoons. Note the award seal on the cover which proudly proclaims: This Book Won Nothing.

The world of nonfiction has a lot of potential gold for the enterprising humor prospector... because you have know some facts about a topic in order to be able to make fun of it. And that’s no joke!

Disclaimer: It’s possible somebody has already thought of some of these jokes/riddles... I came up with them on my own, but people have been kidding around for a long time!

Nonfiction picture books: praise and pet peeves

I just came across this post on The Miss Rumphius Effect from last May, don’t know how it managed to elude me until now. The author of this popular blog, Tricia Stohr-Hunt, has a Ph.D. in Science Education and teaches at The University of Richmond. Nonfiction Picture Books, What I Love and What Makes Me Crazy has very kind words to say about my books and several other terrific authors.

One of the crazy-making issues she mentions is when nonfiction books are lacking...can you guess what?

I’ll give you a hint...or maybe you’ll just have to go read the article. The comments are excellent, also.

My Teacher is a Dinosaur on I.N.K.

The I.N.K. blog (Interesting Nonfiction for Kids) is back after an August hiatus with plenty of interesting articles about nonfiction books. Please visit this link to read my post, Time for prehistory. 

I don’t know if you’ve ever heard of “infographics”... it’s pretty much what it sounds like, just simple graphics that visually convey information. Anyway, I used a few simple ones to help make my point, that while there are a zillion books about dinosaurs, what about the rest of prehistory?

Happy reading!

PW on The Shocking Truth about Energy

I forgot to post this previously, but this book is sure to be a classic, so no worries, right? By the way, take a peek at my fab new favicon. You have to actually be on the blog page to see it up to the left of the URL...it’s a little pile of books and a heart with my initials on top. That’s a lot to fit into a 16 X 16 pixel square(!) In case you’re viewing this in a reader, here it is at 32 X 32 pixels so you can see it:

Anyway, Publishers Weekly included my spring book under the headline Hot Topics!, which highlighted history and science books for young readers.
[excerpt]:
“This lively picture book stars Erg, a lightning bolt of ‘pure energy.’ Erg shares how energy gets transferred into different forms...describes the effects of global warming, and weighs the pros and cons of solar, wind, geothermal....Personified automobiles and appliances communicate via speech balloons, as easy-to-follow flowcharts make a potentially abstract concept tangible.”
Publishers Weekly

Below is a simple diagram from the book showing how water flowing through a dam makes power. (An earlier illustration goes into more detail about how a power plant generates electricity.)

From The Shocking Truth about Energy ©2010 by Loreen Leedy

I always learn a lot when writing and illustrating a book... this one was no exception! An activity/coloring sheet for this book can be found here. To see a spread from this book, please visit this page on my web site.