Kids deserve to know about amazing, courageous people from the past. But sometimes the historical record is too sketchy to tell a strictly nonfiction story about a real event. That’s where historical fiction comes in–writers can tell a story that conveys a historical truth without having the life sucked out of the story by the […]
Nonfiction for very, very young readers is tricky. But Angela DiTerlizzi cracks the code in the delightful book Some Bugs. In fewer than 100 words, she gives us a wonderful glimpse of the wide variety of things insects can do. The wonderful rhymes give the book a feeling of playfulness. Some bugs sting. Some bugs bite. […]
Elementary school children learn about living webs–that plants and animals interact with each other within an environment. There are some great books depicting ecosystem webs–High Tide for Horseshoe Crabs looks at the interactions of animals around Delaware Bay, No Monkeys, No Chocolate examines the interactions of animals and plants in the rain forest, Tree of Wonder explores […]
Last week my nonfiction picture book, Mountain Chef: How One Man Lost His Groceries, Changed His Plans, and Helped Cook up the National Park Service, was published. Some of the process of creating the book was just what I expected: I spent time in archives, poring over crumbling newspapers and gazing at hundred-year old photographs, I […]
The National Park Service is 100 years old this month. Who created it? Theodore Roosevelt and John Muir may be its spiritual fathers, but Muir had already died and Roosevelt was long out of power before the National Park Service was created. There were many people–some of them famous and some of them not–who actually […]