Label: SeeMore Readers

March 5, 2012

I am going to visit a school in Menands, NY later this week, and in preparation for my visit, Ms. Sposito and her first grade class have been reading my books. What a nice surprise to find the lovely photographs and notes that they have been uploading today!

Abbi and Sabrina wrote: We loved your KILLER WHALES book Seymour Simon. We liked the part about the blowhole.  The picture of the pod looks like a group of whales huddling together to have a meeting. How did you get the photo under the water?

Toby and Varun are fans of AMAZING BATS: We like how you added all the facts about the different kinds of bats. How do you know this much about the gigantic flying fox?

Leilah and Mady learned some surprising things from BABY ANIMALS: We loved your Baby Animals book. We were amazed when we read that a humpback whale is 12 feet long at birth.  We were also surprised to find out that baby garter snakes don’t live with their mothers. 

Alicia, Roshni and Brody wrote: We read your book AMAZING BATS. We loved it! There were some parts we really liked. We thought it was disgusting but cool when we read that the ghost bat eats rats. We wondered, does the little brown bat’s stomach hurt when it eats 600 bugs an hour? We think it is silly to sleep upside down!

LaTrell and E-Sonne wrote: We loved your book KILLER WHALES. Whales are cool because they swim really fast and are so huge! We learned that killer whales eat fish. 

Jayden, Lyam and Alyssa liked the same book: We think the Killer Whale book was amazing! We did not know that whales can breathe on top of the water. We think it is cool that whales use flippers to steer and turn. How did you make the book? 

Alexa and Reem wrote: Hi Seymour Simon. We are glad that you are coming this week because we love your Seymour Simon books! We love to read your BABY ANIMALS book. We liked learning about ducklings. We hope you make more books. See you on Thursday. 

Aditi, Shafe, Alexis and Kamellia like BABY ANIMALS, also. They asked: How do you know so much about baby animals? We are so amazed by your books! We want people to read your books. We found out that baby animals are surviving all over the world. They are living things. Have a nice trip coming all the way to Menands. 

December 13, 2010

This weekend I spent a lot of time fooling around with Google Earth, marveling at the incredibly crisp and clear satellite photographs of my house, my street, my neighborhood…..  It is incredible (though a little spooky!) to see the kind of pictures we can capture from cameras orbiting in the exosphere (the outermost portion of Earth’s atmosphere).

Then this morning I came across this photograph of the tallest building in the world - the Burj Khalifa building in Dubai. It was taken by the GeoEye-1 satellite from an altitude of 423 miles. Look at how tiny the other buildings down on the ground look…..and then look at how big the Buri Khalifa appears. Can you think of another way to know, by looking at this photograph, that the building is very tall?

You can tell by looking at the shadows cast by all of the buildings in the photograph. The big building has a shadow that is at least 5 times longer than the shadow of any other building in this cityscape. That really tells you something about how tall this building is!

This skyscraper stands 2,717 feet high, has 160 floors, and is the tallest human-made structure ever built. When the building was opened in January of this year, it returned the location of Earth’s tallest free-standing structure to the Middle East, where the Great Pyramid of Giza held the record for almost four thousand years (up until 1311, when they built the Lincoln Cathedral in England).

When I wrote my book SKYSCRAPERS in 2005, the tallest building in the world was Taipei Financial Center in Taiwan. It rose 1,667 feet into the air, and had 101 stories. 

I wrote in that book:

Skyscrapers are super-tall buildings that seem to scrape against the sky.

When you look down from a high window, people on the streets look like tiny ants.

Clouds may drift by below your view. It feels like you’re on top of the world.

How I would love to be able to look down from the top of this new record-holder. Talk about being in the clouds!