Label: Earth Day 2013

April 4, 2013

For yesterday’s Writing Wednesday we asked readers to review a nature poem called "Welcome to the Night," by Joyce Sidman.

My favorite line from the poem was: "The night’s a wild, enchanted park." Isn’t that a powerful phrase? It conjures up all sorts of images in my mind! 

I promised that I would post my own review, so here it is. 

April 3, 2013

Good morning, and welcome to Writing Wednesday. Today we are going to write a review of a wonderful nature poem by Joyce Sidman called Welcome to the Night. It is from her book DARK EMPEROR AND OTHER POEMS OF THE NIGHT (Houghton Mifflin, 2010). First read the poem below. Read it more than once, try some of the most delicious phrases aloud, use your imagination to see, hear and feel the words that call out to your senses.

Now that we have read this poem, let’s write a poem review. You can use the form below to get you started. Click here to download your own copy of the form, print it out, and write on it. Tomorrow, I will post my own review of Welcome to the Night. We’d love to read yours, too!

April 2, 2013

Hooray! SEYMOUR SIMON’S EXTREME OCEANS is being published today by Chronicle Books.

In honor of publication day, we decided to choose our "Cool Photo of the Week" from this amazing book. This is a photograph of the biggest fish in the ocean, the whale shark. Do you see, at the top right in the photo, the size of the human snorkeler compared to the whale shark?

A whale shark can grow to be 50 feet (15 meters) long and can weigh as much as 80,000 pounds (36,288 kilograms). It has a huge mouth and approximately 3,000 very small teeth. Fortunately, the snorkeler has nothing to fear from this huge fish, which does not have much use for its tiny teeth. The whale shark swims with its mouth wide open to collect seawater, then pushes the water out through its gills and eats the small sea animals that are trapped inside its mouth.

Barbara A. Ward, writing in IRA’s Reading Today wrote of EXTREME OCEANS: "The text and photographs in this engaging nonfiction title are sure to appeal to middle grade readers, especially those attracted to anything extreme, in this case, ocean extremes. The book contains twelve short chapters that explore oceans that are extremely warm and those that are extremely cold as well as the life-threatening enormous waves and tides that sweep in from the ocean’s depths so swiftly. In his usual straightforward style replete with interesting details, this nonfiction maven also covers tsunamis, hurricanes, and sea creatures so incredibly dangerous that no diver wants to encounter them, even briefly. Even those who know plenty about the world’s oceans will still be able to add to that knowledge after reading this photograph-filled book. It has an ocean of interesting facts for readers to share with others."

April 1, 2013

I love this poem, from an anthology that I published a number of years ago. Actually, this is prose that I adapted from WALDEN, written by the great American author, philosopher and naturalist, Henry David Thoreau. I think these lines scan beautifully as poetry, don’t you?

This whole earth which we inhabit

is but a point in space.

How far apart, think you,

dwell the two most distant inhabitants of yonder star,

the breadth of whose disk 

cannot be appreciated by our instruments?

Why should I feel lonely? 

Is not our planet in the Milky Way? 

April 1, 2013

Today we begin our month-long Earth Day 2013 coverage on the Seymour Science blog. This month we are committing to Meatless Mondays (do you know why that helps reduce CO₂ emissions? We will write about that next Monday). We will also be measuring our carbon footprints, suggesting fun and valuable projects that you can do to help protect our environment, and simply celebrating the magnificent beauty of our planet home.

We look forward to your comments throughout the month of April. Tell us what you are doing to celebrate Earth Day in your home, school or community. We hope that you will make it Earth Day, EVERY day, not just in April, but throughout the year.

Photo: "Frog Dancing after Rain" by Shikhei goh

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