Great Non Fiction STEM Reading Ideas

Rebecca Hill     

                  

STEM reading has a personality all of its own.  It has its own jargon.  Sentence structures and content are more complex.  Charts, symbols, diagrams and equations populate the pages.  Even different literacy skills are required. With the advent of the Common Core, integrating literacy into STEM curriculum is the new challenge and most STEM teachers are wondering exactly how they will include it in an already packed curriculum.

In recent years a plethora of STEM-oriented narrative nonfiction has populated the shelves of our local bookstores and libraries. Lively discussions and readings on STEM topics from such expert authors as Steven Pinker, Stuart Firestein, Erik Larsen, Douglas Brinkley and others have all written narrative nonfiction that makes for fascinating and intriguing STEM reading. Under their tutelage STEM subjects come to life. With fascinating accounts of real lives and events, these books bring a contemporary real-time feel that will inspire students, making them an ideal vehicle for meeting Common Core literacy requirements. For those STEM teachers or school librarians looking for some great suggestions of STEM narrative nonfiction read on for some great options to introduce for STEM nonfiction reading as a support for textbook learning. 

Ignorance: How It Drives Science by Stuart Firestein.  Neuroscientist and Columbia University’s Biology Chair, Firestein explores how ignorance helps scientists concentrate and expand their research. 

The Half Life of Facts by Samuel Arbesman.  Applied mathematician and network scientist Arbesman chronicles how and why our most basic ideas, theories and facts change over the course of time.  

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker is a fascinating neurological and psychological study on why we act rationally and/or irrationally.

Virus Hunters: Thirty Years of Battling Hot Viruses around the World by C.J. Peters and Mark Olshaker. Written by the Commander of the Army Virology Unit that fought Ebola in Preston’s book, The Hot Zone, Peters’ Virus Hunters demonstrates an entirely new version of the American Cowboy-one that risks his life in the search for highly infectious diseases like Marburg, Ebola and others.

Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic by David Quammens, an award winning American science and nature writer, presents frightening new evidence about how our continued encroachment on natural habitats and our hyper-mobility as a population exposes us to greater viral threats. 

In Pursuit of the Unknown: 17 Equations that Changes the World by Emeritus Professor of Mathematics at Warwick University, Ian Stewart.  Stewart's book shares the stories behind the mathematical equations that have most influenced our world.

A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar chronicles life and struggles of American mathematical genius, John Nash.  A mathematician in game theory, differential geometry and partial differential equations, Nash struggled mightily with paranoid schizophrenia, a condition that led to his hospitalization on numerous occasions, but despite this struggle, he persevered and won the Nobel Prize in Economics.   

Longitude by Dava Sobel tells the story of math in practice, sharing the fascinating tales of sailors learning their way through wild and treacherous seas. 

Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet by  Andrew Blum follows Blum while he travels to UCLA to see one of the first networked computers to Google headquarters where he journeys to their lunchroom then to visiting cable landing stations that house the entry points for the undersea fiber optics that connect us to the rest of the world.  It is a detailed account of cyberspace from its primal beginning to its “cloud.”

Almost Human: Making Robots Think by Lee Gutkind.  Gutkind profiles fascinating roboticists like Dr. William “Red” Whittaker, Fredken Professor of Robotics whose current projects include robots to search for and recover meteorites in Antarctica and Lunar Rover, mobile robots for a privately funded lunar mission. 

How to Survive a Robot Uprising: Tips on Defending Yourself against the Coming Rebellion by Dr. Daniel H. Wilson is a tongue-in-cheek survival guide teaching humans the secrets to defending   He also wrote the science fiction novel, Robopocalypse. 

Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age by Bill McKibben. McKibben explores the frontiers of genetic engineering, robotics and nanotechnology from a bioethical standpoint and also provides a fascinating contrast for discussion points in technology and engineering classes. 

Bomb: The Race to Build and Steal the World’s Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin provides a fascinating account of the Manhattan Project. 

American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin paints a detailed picture of the scientific genius behind the building of the bomb and as a man vilified for his advocacy for control of nuclear weapons. 

The Great Deluge: Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast by Douglas Brinkley gives a birds-eye view of one of the worst hurricanes to ever hit the United States Gulf Coastal areas, and its aftermath, paying particular attention to the governmental failure and ramifications of emergency medical care in the time of extreme climate changes. 

Isaac’s Storm: A Man, a Time and the Deadliest Hurricane in History by Erik Larsen tells the story of Isaac Cline, a U.S. Weather Bureau meteorologist and the seaside town of Galveston, Texas which was submerged by a monster hurricane in 1900.  The book tells of the failures and prejudices of the U.S. Weather Bureau that resulted in the devastation of Galveston and the loss of hundreds of lives. 

Storm Kings: The Untold History of America’s First Tornado Chasers by Lee Sandlin gives a fascinating account of the first reported tornado in 1680 and illustrates just how steep our learning curves have been about tornadoes, starting with Ben Franklin’s famous kite experiment to how we now classify tornadoes as F1-F5 storms. While Sandlin’s book takes a look back at those folks who chase tornadoes, it is also a very unique history that examines America’s history with violent weather and how we have adjusted and learned from it.  

The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery covers most of the basics of climate change and is one of the leading books in weather and climate change.  

Great New Features Added To Our Library Catalog!

We are excited to share two of our favorite features added to HMMPL's Evergreen Catalog that will help teachers plan lessons and create reading lists. 

Time saver... Learn how to search for items by shelving locations in the Hussey-Mayfield Library and create book lists that link to the catalog. You can create a book/DVD/CD list and share it with your class or save it in your account. Every year you can refer to this list.  To save you time, select items from this list and put them on HOLD. We will pull them for you as they become available.

Here is a list of 3rd-5th grade level World War II Juvenile Fiction Books.  They are located with the shelving locations: Fiction-1st Floor, Tween-1st Floor, and Newbery-1st Floor.

World War II jFiction Books 

We can create lists with specific reading levels and topics for you or teach you how.  Let us know and we will be happy to assist you!

Full STEAM Ahead: A STEAM Primer

Put together an art teacher, music teacher and a science teacher-what would you get?  At Dayton Regional STEM School in Dayton, Ohio, you would get origami butterflies, illustrated storybooks and watercolors of cells. At Taylor Elementary School in Arlington, Virginia, you would get music and paintings on the life cycle of flowers. These are just a few projects that were born from a STEAM-Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Mathematics-partnership between art science, and music teachers.

What is STEAM?

Advocated by John Maeda of the Rhode Island School of Design, STEAM integrates art and design with STEM concepts. Even though STEAM is grounded in the premise that creativity is the basis of all innovation, you might not think that art and science would be likely partners.  But are they similar or polar opposites?

Both Kate Cook and Jenny Montgomery from Dayton Regional STEM School claim that their partnership is successful because their content areas, art and science, can harmonize together.  “Both artists and scientists aim to explore and make sense of the world,” Cook said. “While we use different lenses, they are often complimentary.”

Working together inspired both, Cook and Montgomery, to think about content in different ways.  Much of what being learned in my biology class is, Cook says, “visual in nature.”  In science, students spend a great deal of time creating and interpreting models through repeat experimentation. And just as scientists explore discovery through experimentation, artists also create a design or structure using form and function, sometimes using engineering and mathematical concepts to build their desired artistic outcome.

In the end, artists and scientists take risks, make mistakes and start over again all with the ultimate end of innovation or discovery. With Jeremy Ferrar, Bianca Sanchez and Elizabeth Ashley at Taylor Elementary, they found through collaboration that their students learned to better communicate and work as a group. 

“Rather than telling them what to do,” said Sanchez, “we present them with a problem which forced them to think creatively.” 

In fact, multiple studies show that a strong arts education contributes and improves a student’s cognition, memory and attention skills in the classroom, an attribute that Taylor Elementary attests to.  (Hardiman, 2009) Further, a 2002 study by Americans for the Arts found too that an arts education strengthens problem-solving and critical-thinking skills thereby increasing a student’s overall academic achievement in school.  (Arts, 2002) So it seems that both disciplines use skills interchangeable with the other.

To see the full article, check out Full STEAM Ahead at Parent Guide magazine. 

What is Project Based Learning?

At Coons Rapids High School in Minnesota, Leah Sams’ biomedical class, over 25 weeks, investigated a staged death, using a manikin for a body. They performed labs on pills found near her body.  They did fingerprint and footprint comparisons.  They used fake blood drops with a similar viscosity as blood at various drop-heights to determine the splatter effect at various trajectories.  They then compared those labs to the drops found at the crime scene.  “The class really enjoyed the blood spatter lab,” said Sams. “They also enjoyed the body temperature lab where they calculated various temperatures, made inferences based on how long it took to get the victim’s body temperature when found, and completed a graph on the results.”  All of this work was strictly hands-on, project based learning of a realistic experience. 

Project based learning is not a unique concept.  Doing projects has been a long standing tradition in American education.  When educators talk about project based learning (PBL), they are really talking about projects like Sams’ dead body. PBL has been shown to help kids retain information better and for longer periods of time and to demonstrate improved communication and collaboration skills.  How it’s done varies.  Some schools use Project Lead the Way, which provides STEM curriculum for participating schools.  Other schools use curriculums from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and Museum of Science in Boston.  Internet resources are vast with sites like Edutopia, NASA, NSF, How Stuff Works, Engineer Girls, GEMS, and others.  But the key aspect of PBL is that students are actually doing the work and coming up with real results.  As a teaching method, it is exciting; however, it requires a learning curve for teachers and their students. 

Dr. Shannon McKinney, Principal at K-5 Elementary School at Boren in Seattle, found that her teachers were more than ready to break out of the traditional school learning modes.  ”We knew that we wanted to integrate and present concepts in a project based learning model,” said McKinney. But it requires, says McKinney, planning and collaboration across the curriculum for it to be successful.  In the end, students and teachers end up focusing on real world, hands on projects like solving the mystery of a dead body.  They are getting their heads out of textbooks and behaving like real world experts. 

To read more about Project Based Learning and STEM see the following article Getting Their Hands Dirty: Project-Based Learning and STEM

Away We Go!!! Virtual Field Trips for the Classroom

Want to take a field trip but there’s no money in the budget for school field trips?  Virtual field trips are a way that you can take your entire class to places unknown, to visit students from other countries and to make learning more tangible and real to your students.  Virtual field trips are guided field tours through the Internet that provide an organized collection of web pages designed to provide a structured online learning experience.  Various options are available for classes to explore.  Teachers can use videoconferencing and audio conferencing technologies to set up dates for their students to meet and learn from other students in other states and countries. Using free services like Skype and a web cam teachers can set up interviews with authors, scientists and other professionals and take advantage of videoconferencing opportunities established by museums and zoos.  Hundreds of opportunities exist for virtual field trips; here is a brief list that can expand your teaching from the pages of a textbook to the real world. 
            La  Louvre 

Experience a 360 degree panoramic view of many of the museum's valuable attributes.  Tours include Egyptian Antiquities, Remains of the Louvre Moat, and the Galerie d’Apollon. 
Arctic Adventures 

Free to the K-12 community, Arctic Adventures uses exciting Arctic dogsled expeditions and Arctic research to help students understand natural and social sciences in the cultures of the Arctic.
Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History   

Students can take a virtual, self guided tour, room by room, of the National Museum of Natural History.  Students can use their own computers or smart phones to follow museum map arrows to see exhibits for a virtual experience that makes them feel as if they are standing right in front of the exhibit.  
White House 
Students can take a virtual tour of the White House by watching inclusive “Inside the White House” videos and tours to the West Wing, East Wing, Residence and South Lawn.  For study on presidents, teachers can use the White House’s slide presentation of the presidents and historical information. 
Outer Space

No virtual field trip is complete without a trip to outer space through NASA’s downloadable field trip.  Students can explore areas on Earth that have been identified as sharing common traits to various Mars regions.  Younger students can take a trip to the Moon. 

How to Renew Your Library Materials

Three ways that you can renew your library materials:

• Renew at either Circulation desks or at a self-check station                                                     

• Renew by phone 317-873-8340 to reach the Circulation desk                 

   ***If you’d like to extend the checkout period for any materials, please call or ask while you’re checking out in person.

• Renew online using  My Account  (You will also need your Library card number or username and your account password)

Hussey-Mayfield Public Library Teacher Card

Hussey-Mayfield Public Library Teacher Card

Features:

1. Borrow a variety of materials for use in your classroom or lesson planning, including youth, young adult and adult books, audiobooks,  music CDs, and DVDs.  There are no restrictions on the types of materials they can borrow. Borrow up to 100 items
2. Request extended loan period: Videos/DVDs: 14 days [usually 7 days], Books: up to 6 weeks [usually 3 weeks.] Extensions may be obtained by calling the Circulation desk, 317-873-8340 or while checking out in person.
3. Place holds on up to 20 items
4. Your library card will give you access to our rich database resources such as:

•   Overdrive(download free AudioBooks and eBooks using your Library card.)
•   Freegal (Download up to 3 free songs per week to your audio device using your Library card!)
•   Rocket Languages (Learn as many as 11 languages using this free, fun interactive program!)
•   NoveList (an electronic fiction readers' advisory database of over 120,000 fiction titles including Author  Read-alikes, Book Discussion Guides, BookTalks, and Feature Articles.)

We hope this card will allow you to take advantage of the Library’s rich collection for your students!
Applying for a Teacher Library Card

Who can apply for a Teacher Library Card?

• Teachers, student teachers and paid workers in the classroom not classified as a teacher, who reside outside the Library District, but work in local public and private schools. 
• Teachers in day care centers located inside the Library District.
• Teachers who also reside in the Library District may receive the same benefits of a teacher's card  on materials checked out for classroom use.

How do you get a Hussey-Mayfield Memorial Public Library Card?

When you apply for this card,  be prepared to show their Driver’s License showing your current residence address and proof of school employment, i.e. a paystub or school ID. 

Cards issued to those who do not live in Zionsville will expire 1 year from the issue date or be deleted from the file if the cardholder no longer works in the classroom in the Library District. The card may be renewed if the teacher or classroom assistant is still employed in the position during the subsequent school year.