Stay cool, now…

Over 10,700 bloggers have joined in a global conversation so far today, and the number is still climbing as I write this.  It’s Blog Action Day–and the topic is climate change.

I spent some time this afternoon looking at kids’ resources on climate change.  Now, if I have a pet peeve about the publishing world, it’s the continuing lack of quality nonfiction for early elementary kids.  There have been some marvelous strides forward, don’t get me wrong–things have improved greatly in the last ten years.  But I still find myself at purchase order time, swearing under my breath as I scan library periodicals, publisher catalogs and vendor websites trying to find excellent nonfiction for my young students.  Science books in particular are a challenge to find–some authors dumb down material to the point that the material is erroneous or incomprehensible.

So it’s a pleasure to discover some great print resources on climate change for the K-6 crowd.

• Spend some time reading the I.N.K. Blog: Interesting Nonfiction for Kids and you’ll find lots of children’s nonfiction to celebrate.  Marfe Ferguson Delano blogged on INK about her new book, Earth in the Hot Seat: Bulletins from a Warming World (National Geographic, 2009), describing the decisions she made about how she presented the facts of global warming.  The book scored a starred review from SLJ.
• For a younger crowd, there’s the picture book format Polar Bear, Why is Your World Melting? by Robert Wells (Albert Whitman & Company, 2008).  One third grade teacher I know used this book last winter as part of a persuasive letter writing project–kids wrote letters outlining their ideas for cutting back on carbon emissions.
• Another nonfiction picture book: Why Are the Ice Caps Melting? The Dangers of Global Warming, by Anne Rockwell (Harper Collins, 2006.)

Heaven knows there’s a ocean of information on the web about climate change–umm, a rising ocean, thanks to the melting of polar ice.  Here are a few rafts to cling to:

• From the EPA, the Climate Change Kids’ Site
• Recommended books & websites for science teachers from the  NYS Department of Environmental Conservation
• Time for Kids Special Report on Global Warming

Stay cool, y’all.

UPDATE:  I should have mentioned two other website / blogs:  Beyond Penguins and Polar Bears:  An Online Magazine for K-5 Teachers and Meltfactor.org, the blog of Ohio State professor Jason Box.  I also just picked up the children’s picture book, Once I Was a Cardboard Box…But Now I’m a Book about Polar Bears! by Anton Poitier.  It just happened to be in the Scholastic Book Fair we’re hosting.  It’s a cute concept–the book is printed on paper made from…well, a recycled cardboard box.  The text has two “stories” side-by-side: the story of the life and threatened extinction of the polar bear, and the recycling of the paper on which the book is printed.

The official Blog Action Day count was 13,398 blogs from 155 countries.

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The incredible Taylor Mali: “I’ll Fight You for the Library!”

I’ve been a Taylor Mali fan for quite a while.  He’s a teacher / performer / slam poet whose poems depict the triumphs, joys, frustrations and defeats of the teaching profession.  Take a look at this YouTube Video, in which Mali tells what he describes as the true story of the e-mails sent to an administrator by a teacher irate at being denied access to the school library. It’s funny and moving all at once. 

I love the fact that this is a YouTube video (shiny visual social media) of a live performance (the original storytelling media) about an e-mail message (digital again!) from a teacher whose students are denied access to books (those papery objects that preceded iPods and Kindles.

You know, the stuff Cushing Academy discarded

Fighting mythical battles

Banned Books Week? How about Banned Resources Week? Overzealous internet filtering keeps students away from resources in the same way that censorship keeps books out of their hands–that’s the argument of this great post from WNY Education Associates.

No, I don’t want little kids to be exposed to pornography or graphic violence.  But isn’t there some kind of happy medium? Take, for example, the website of Dr. Temple Grandin, noted author & speaker on living with autism.  She herself is autistic.  For no good reason I can see, her website is blocked by at least one widely used internet filter.

A quote from the blog post I linked to above: “I would guess that engaging in mythical battles allows us to construct all sorts of impressive armor.”  Wholesale internet filtering gives people a toasty, safe, St. George kind of feeling, as if they’ve slain the dragons of privacy invasion, online predation, and dangerously different ideas.  But if all sites with any kind of chat or social interaction are banned, how do students learn to protect personal information? Kids who are never taught to think about their online profiles are the ones who will lose out on job opportunities when potential employers view ill-considered posts or compromising photos.  If students are banned from e-mail at school, who teaches them what to do with the unlovely spam they get? And if teachers, counselors, and administrators can’t access Facebook or other social sites from school computers, how will they even know if cyberbullying, suicidal intentions, or threats of violence or  have been posted by their students?

As Angela points out, the sense of security is a false one, anyway.  If you’re never taught to recognize danger, you won’t know it when you see it.

Here’s a great quote from a fantasy novel by Lois McMaster Bujold.  Her novels have nothing to do with internet filtering, but the words are right on target nonetheless:  innocence based in ignorance is unfit to protect itself.