State’s teachers make science book selections Choices to appear in guide for grade schools

ORONO – When she picked up “The Winking Blinking Sea: All About Bioluminescence” by Mary Batten, Peg Welch wondered why anyone would write a book about glow-in-the-dark sea creatures.

But the opening page hooked her, Welch said.

“When the sun sets and darkness falls over the land, millions of lights twinkle under the sea. … Sea lights are cold lights that some ocean animals make from chemicals in their bodies,” Welch read. “‘Bio’ means life and ‘lumin’ means light. So bioluminescence means ‘living light’.”

Standing before two dozen other teachers, Welch, a third-grade teacher in Bangor, told them the book’s writing and vivid photographs grabbed her, and significantly, that the writing was great for reading aloud. That made the book one of her top choices of nonfiction science writing since 1999 for kindergarten-through-sixth-grade pupils.

Welch is part of a team of six Maine teachers and a doctoral student in literacy at the University of Maine working under the guidance of two UMaine literacy professors. The professors are editing the nonfiction science section for the forthcoming 13th edition of “Adventuring with Books.”

Put together by the National Council of Teachers of English, the book is a guide for teachers to find quality books for K-6 classrooms. The volume is published every three years, with the next edition slated for 2002.

On Wednesday, the teachers presented many of their recommendations for the nonfiction science section of the book at a literacy conference at UMaine.

The books presented were the ones that “have survived our ongoing review, discussion and field testing” of the past 18 months, said Sandip Wilson, the UMaine doctoral student.

If your young child wants to know about drinking water, Sue Pidhurney, a primary grade teacher in Ellsworth, recommended “Drip! Drop! How Water Gets to Your Tap,” by Barbara Seuling.

The book has few words, is colorful and brightly illustrated and talks about the water cycle, Pidhurney said. It includes lots of hands on activities and step-by-step experiments, like evaporating water.

In judging the books, the teachers came with a list of 11 guidelines. They include: organization, design, accuracy, how up to date they are, appropriateness of language and visual imagery, and the extent to which different kinds of information are presented.

Andy Stephenson, a middle grades teacher in Southwest Harbor, cited “See the Stars: Your First Guide to the Night Sky” by Ken Crosswell as a book that does a good job of giving practical advice for finding constellations.

Going month by month, the book describes a constellation, tells you where to look for it in the night sky, highlights the major stars in it, then shows a photo of the night sky with the stars picked out.

Jan Elie, a primary school teacher in Auburn, picked as one her choices “The Snake Scientist” by Sy Montgomery.

The book’s opening paragraphs captured her.

“You can hear them before you see them,” she read. “On a quiet day, as you approach one of the dens at the Narcisse Wildlife Management Area in Manitoba, Canada, you can hear a rustling like wind in dry leaves. It’s the sound of slithering snakes.

“When you look over the fence into the shallow limestone pit, at first, it seems as if the ground is moving. But it’s not ground, it’s 18,000 red-sided garter snakes!”

The book’s language and its direct quotations and conversations between scientists studying snakes bring science concepts home for students, she said.

Another of her recommendations was a gallery of snakes, Chris Mattison’s “Snake: The Essential Visual Guide to the World of Snakes.”

The book is set up in a double-page layout, she pointed out. The left-hand page gives facts, descriptions and identifiers of the snakes and where they’re found, among other things.

The right-hand page of the oversize book is a full-page picture of the snake.

“Kids just eat that up,” she said. “And if they know it drives you crazy, they eat it up even more.”

Along with Welch, Stephenson, Wilson, Pidhurney and Elie, teachers involved in the project are Candis Penley of Hampden and Mary Evans of Veazie.

Their selections and the brief descriptions they are writing for “Adventuring with Books” are being edited by Jan Kristo and Rosemary Bamford of the University of Maine.

Along with editing the chapter on nonfiction science books, Kristo is editing the entire volume, along with Amy McClure of Ohio Wesleyan University.