Science Experiments For the Kitchen - Cook and Learn by Kristen Wilkinson

Did you start a garden this summer or visit your local farmer’s market? If so, keep the learning about plants going with Science Experiments You Can Eat, written by Vicki Cobb and illustrated by Tad Carpenter. Now that you’ve grown all those lovely vegetables in your garden, you can bring them into the kitchen for some science experiments. You can run an experiment to explore how plants take in water and how water moves up the stem of a plant. You can even investigate the chemical reactions that happen with chlorophyll and cellulose when you cook plants. 
 
Make a delicious lemon fizz and watch the reaction as gas is formed. Use the red cabbage indicator from an earlier experiment to determine if the lemon fizz is an acid or a base. Learn about stabilized emulsions by making your own mayonnaise. Keep your fresh baked cookies crisp by determining which type of sweetener (granulated sugar versus honey) is more hydroscopic than the other. Hydroscopic means “wet cooking” by the way. This book is great for cooks of all ages (with supervision) and adults will even learn a thing or two.
 
The experiments in this book are easy to follow and accompanied by helpful background information on the concept you are investigating. And, as the title promises, you can eat each experiment after you are finished learning!
 
I have learned through my work at the Environmental Learning Center that kids are natural scientists; they are curious and love to learn about the world around them. You can encourage this curiosity at home through science experiments like these. Maybe the next time your child has one of their unending “why” questions, you’ll be able to help them design an experiment to find the answer on their own!

Kristen Wilkinson is the Program Director for the Colorado State University Environmental Learning Center, an environmental education outreach center in Northern Colorado for children and adults.

Download the FREE PDF on Tips for Connecting Books to Summer Fun. Watch for more book titles and tips coming weekly through the summer. Sign up for the newsletter HERE to keep up with articles and you will receive the free writing template for Travel Trouble.

Authentic Reading and Writing Opportunities for Summer to Build Background Knowledge

Summer is a time to put aside the constraints of the classroom, let loose, and have some fun, but that doesn't mean kids stop learning. In fact, summer is a great time to build background knowledge by exploring kids' special interests and activities through books.

START WITH A BOOK

Reading Rockets has put together a wonderful, free resource called Start With a Book. It includes three parts:

1. Choose a Topic to Explore - Reading Rockets provides a list of 24 different topics including Birds and Animals, Inventions and Inventors, Cooking and Food, Geography and Travel, and Nature: Our Green World. Many of these topics are also related to my Free PDF on Tips for Connecting Books with Summer Fun.

2. Find Great Kids Books - Under each topic, Reading Rockets provides links to several children's book titles, but that's not all. They also make suggestions for writing activities like Keeping a Nature Journal, Let's Write a Recipe, Building Stories where kids design a house, and Robots and Work where kids brainstorm an invention of a robot and write about it.

3. Keep the Adventure Going - Reading Rockets provides websites, podcasts, and more connected with each topic so kids can continue to build background knowledge.

READWORKS

Would you prefer short non-fiction articles for older students on a greater variety of subjects? Does your child have difficulty reading on their own? If so, you may want to check out ReadWorks. It is a free resource for educators and parents that provides short reading passages along with vocabulary activities and comprehension questions, on a variety of topics including STEM, social studies, poetry, and literary fiction. They include a recording of each reading passage to support struggling readers. To sign up for ReadWorks and learn more about what they offer, go to their website at https://www.readworks.org/.  Articles are listed by grade level and length.

Through ReadWorks, kids can learn about geysers before visiting Yellowstone, read about a farmer's market in New York City before spending a day at their local venue, or investigate an animal that stirs their interest after a trip to the local zoo. These are all ways to build authentic reading experiences and background knowledge while capitalizing on a child's natural curiosity.

So have fun with those summer activities, but make those activities even more interesting by connecting them with something fun to read!

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My Pandemic Garden and the Wisdom of Thinking Small

Does anybody else have a pandemic garden that looks like this... empty... nothing growing in it because now we are all out traveling and having grand adventures? I got so deeply into gardening during the pandemic that we tore out all the grass that was previously growing here. I even invested in a composter. See it in the corner in the picture below? I think the same gunk is in it from a year ago. I'm a little afraid to open it, to be honest. Thank goodness my husband knows me well enough to have suggested (rather strongly) that I start my agricultural project on the side of the house that no one can see. Right now it's just empty space. In a few weeks, there will be weeds to deal with. That's what happens when you take out the grass and leave nothing but dirt and bark mulch.

Gardening is one of the topics in my summer series on Tips for Connecting Books with Summer Fun. Getting kids involved in gardening is a good way to expand their background knowledge in science. Even my grown kids got involved in this garden. My son helped me tear out the grass and my daughter watered and weeded. Now they are both off to new adventures in graduate school, which is part of the reason my garden looks so empty.

Recently, I came across Grow All You Can Eat in 3 Square Feet: Inventive Ideas for Growing Food in a Small Space by DK Publishing. Many people live in apartments or may rent a house and don't have permission to dig up the grass to plant vegetables. Even if you have a large yard, there can be good reasons for starting a garden in a small space. During the pandemic, many people in my neighborhood started planting gardens. I wasn't the only one, but now many of their gardens look like mine. I forgot about the wisdom of thinking small and starting with something not only manageable in the short term but sustainable for the long term. I wish I had come across this book then.

Grow All You Can Eat provides colorful photographs and step-by-step directions for things you would expect like container gardens and window boxes, but there are also tips on planting vegetables in a reusable shopping bag and building a fence trellis out of old bicycle wheels. There are many tips that are useful even if you have more space such as how to extend the growing season, making use of the space between plants with intercropping, and planting slow crops with fast-growing crops.

If you would rather try a community garden, check out the post earlier in May about Books on Community Gardening and Pollination.

To be honest, I will most likely spend this summer enjoying the fruits of other gardeners' labor at my local farmer's market.

Download the FREE PDF on Tips for Connecting Books to Summer Fun. Watch for more book titles and tips coming weekly through the summer. Sign up for the newsletter HERE to keep up with articles and you will receive the free writing template for Travel Trouble.

Children's Books for Better Speech and Hearing Month

Sharing books about main characters with disabilities promotes awareness and acceptance. The three books I will be discussing today also happen to have connections to my summer series on Tips for Connecting Books to Summer Fun. They are all fiction titles, but one is about gardening (albeit in dystopian Australia). One is about wild birds, and another ends with a concert in the park.

A good place to find some of the best books featuring characters with disabilities is on the American Library Association (ALA) website page for the Schneider Family Book Award. The purpose of the award is to honor an author or illustrator for a book that, "...embodies an artistic expression of the disability experience for child and adolescent audiences." Every January, the ALA announces winners in the age categories of 0-8, 9-13, and 14-18. Some of the highlights for the recent 2022 awards are below.

The winner in the young children's category was My City Speaks. Photographer Darren Lebeuf and paper artist Ashley Barron have created a visually engaging tale of a girl with a visual impairment and her father as they travel to familiar spots in their city (including a community garden) and finally arrive at a concert stage in the park where she plays the violin.

The winner in the middle-grade category was A Bird Will Soar, by Alison Green Meyers. It is written from the perspective of Axel, a boy on the autism spectrum who loves birds but often finds family confusing. He makes sense of the people around him by comparing them to birds. The insight into Axel's inner thoughts and feelings is part of what makes this book so remarkable. When a storm destroys an eagle's nest, Axel must help a struggling eaglet to heal. The story is filled with poems and lots of interesting bird facts. 

The winner in the teen category was Words in my Hands, written and illustrated by Asphyxia and published by Annick Press. It is an illustrated novel told in a combination of text, paint, collage, and sketch about a girl who is deaf and is living in a slightly futuristic world in Australia filled with food insecurity, political upheaval, and environmental turmoil. It is dystopian but at the same time frighteningly realistic. Ultimately it is a story of resilience and hope as Piper, the main character, strives to create a sustainable garden and find her "voice." Asphyxia, the author/illustrator, is deaf and has included a "Dear Reader" note at the end of the book that shares ideas for how the hearing can be more sensitive and inclusive of people with hearing challenges.

For books about gardening for younger readers, see the books in last week's blog post about Books on Community Gardening and Pollination.

Since May is Better Speech and Hearing Month, you may want to check out the book list I created last November about Children's Books Featuring Main Characters with Speech, Language, Learning, and Hearing Challenges. Because many kids with speech and language challenges also struggle with reading, you may also want to share stories from my list of Children's Books Featuring Main Characters with Dyslexia. Don't forget the list I shared in April for Autism Awareness Month. 

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Books on Community Gardening and Pollination to Inspire Young Readers by Kristen Wilkinson

Miguel’s Community Garden, written by JaNay Brown-Wood and illustrated by Samara Hardy, is a beautiful, interactive story. The author guides readers to help Miguel find his sunflowers by comparing plant characteristics, such as leaf shape and petal color, which are illustrated in plenty of detail to allow readers to investigate the garden. The diverse cast of characters shows that everyone is welcome at the community garden. The colorful, detailed illustrations will keep kids’ attention while the story guides parents to discuss the different plants they see from spinach to mushrooms. You don’t need to be a plant expert to help Miguel find his sunflowers in time for the garden party!

 

The Reason for a Flower: A Book About Flowers, Pollen, and Seeds, written and illustrated by Ruth Heller, explains the process of pollination in fanciful verse. Read these two books together with your 6-9 year old child to show how pollination produces many of the foods present in Miguel’s Community Garden.

 

Explore your own kitchen to find foods that are the result of pollination such as tomatoes, apples or rice. If you have a garden or can visit one, go looking for pollinators like bees and butterflies, and see if you can watch them at work. Make note of which flowers they visit. Then come back in a few weeks to see if a fruit is growing from the pollinated flowers.

 

Exploring the natural world with your child can be as simple as looking for insects outside your front door. At the Environmental Learning Center, we emphasize that any time spent outdoors is valuable. Kids don’t need a grand adventure to the wilderness; they just need to explore in their neighborhood with a caring adult.  

Kristen Wilkinson is the Program Director for the Colorado State University Environmental Learning Center, an environmental education outreach center in Northern Colorado for children and adults.

Download the FREE PDF on Tips for Connecting Books to Summer Fun. Watch for more book titles and tips coming weekly through the summer. Sign up for the newsletter HERE to keep up with articles and you will receive the free writing template for Travel Trouble.

5 Tips for Connecting Books with Summer Fun

It’s summer and it is tempting to set aside books for more hands-on activities, but why not explore those activities more deeply by connecting books with summer adventures like planting a garden, exploring science in the kitchen, becoming an inventor, going to a national park, or visiting a zoo?                                                                                                  

Discover book titles to go with each of these activities here on my blog in the summer series I am creating with Kristen Wilkinson, guest blogger and Program Director for the Colorado State University Environmental Learning Center, an environmental education outreach center in Northern Colorado for children and adults. She will be joining us throughout the summer with tips and book reviews.

Kristen and I started by creating the 5 Tips which we will expand on throughout the summer. They may be downloaded in a FREE PDF on my website at wordtravelliteracy.com where more free PDFs may be found on my page for Parent Resources. If you are an educator, consider sending the PDF or the link home with students to promote summer reading and be sure to check out my page for Teacher Resources.

5 TIPS FOR CONNECTING BOOKS WITH SUMMER FUN

1. Plant a Garden– Plant zucchini in a reusable shopping bag on an apartment balcony or build a fence trellis with old bicycle wheels for climbing cucumbers. Explore these ideas and more with step-by-step directions and photographs in Grow All You Can Eat in 3 Square Feet: Inventive Ideas for Growing Food in a Small Space by DK Publishing. You may want to participate in a group garden like the main character in Miguel’s Community Garden written by JaNay Brown-Wood and illustrated by Samara Hardy. It’s ideal for ages 3-7. Maybe you’d just like to visit a community garden or attend a local Grower’s Market. For further exploration, SciShow Kids has YouTube episodes on How Does a Seed Become a Plant? and Grow Your Own Plants!

2. Explore Science in the Kitchen – Use those healthy foods you grew in your garden or bought at the Grower’s Market and have fun cooking. Take your culinary adventure one step further by learning the chemical properties of food. Make a science experiment out of the process with Science Experiments You Can Eat (Revised and Updated) written by Vicki Cobb and illustrated by Tad Carpenter. It is perfect for ages 8 and up. SciShow Kids also has a whole series on cooking with science: Baking a Cake with Science, How to Build a Solar Oven, and Why Does Cooking Eggs Make Them Hard?

3. Become an Inventor – Read about real-life inventors in books like Franz’s Phantasmagorical Machine written by Beth Anderson and illustrated by Caroline Hamel. Many items around the house can be used with the suggestions outlined by Temple Grandin in Calling All Minds: How to Think and Create Like an Inventor. If your kids have ideas for inventions that are a little too complicated or dangerous to try at home, send their designs to Kids Invent Stuff https://kidsinventstuff.com/. The website links to the YouTube channel where you can watch the engineer hosts, Ruth and Shawn, build the inventions of kids ages 4-11. They even offer prizes. Even if your kid’s invention idea is not selected, that’s okay. Submitting a written description along with a video or drawing is a great way to promote summer writing and creative thinking.

4. Visit a National Park  – If you aren’t able to take a big trip, go on a nature walk, visit a local natural area, or take a virtual trip through nature by watching America’s National Parks by National Geographic (Disney+) or Born in the Rockies by Nature (PBS) Either way, start your journey by reading books like National Parks of the U.S.A. written by Kate Siber and illustrated by Chris Turnham or Grand Canyon written and illustrated by Jason Chin. These books can be read aloud to young children or explored on their own by kids ages 7 and up. They are also great resources for adults.

5. Visit a Zoo or Wild Animal Park – If you don’t have one nearby, watch shows like Animals with Cameras by Nature (PBS). Read about the fascinating world of wild animals in books like Make Way for Animals!: A World of Wildlife Crossings written by Meeg Pincus and illustrated by Bao Luu and discover real-life animal heroes in 125 Animals That Changed the World by Brenna Maloney. Read more about wildlife crossings at https://www.wildways.us/.

Don’t forget to visit your local library or bookstore to find more fun books and ask about their summer reading programs while you are there.

Watch for more book titles and tips including activities for Real-World Writing by following this blog. Sign up for my newsletter HERE to receive the free writing template for Travel Trouble.

 

Autism Awareness Month

I'm very excited to share the news that just out in April, 2022, is a new book about Temple Grandin. She Persisted: Temple Grandin is a chapter book from the She Persisted series written by Lyn Miller Lachmann.   

I interviewed the author, Lyn, in April of 2021 about her challenges with Asperger's Syndrome and her fiction title, Rogue. It's about a young girl on the spectrum who views herself like the X-Men character,  Rogue. It contains biographical connections to Lyn Miller-Lachmann's personal experience with Asperger's. Find that interview HERE.  

There have been several books for children written about (and by) Temple Grandin for a wide range of age groups. Last April, I wrote a post exploring several titles. Find that post HERE.

Another book to check out is I Am Odd, I Am New written by Benjamin Giroux, a child with Asperger's Syndrome when he was ten-years-old.  There is a great post describing the book at Unpacking the Power of Picture Books.  The original poem may be found at the Good News Network.

Check out the recent post from Brooke's Publishing on 13 Ways to Support the Behavior and Learning of Students on the Autism Spectrum.

For additional resources, check out the following websites:

Autism Speaks

Autism Society

Organization for Autism Research

Understood

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