The authors of Wildlife and Plants, 3rd edition (Marshall Cavendish Reference) write that the nest tunnels are “3-7 feet long.” In Water Birds of California, author Howard L. Cogswell says “3 to 6 feet (even 10),” while World Book Encyclopedia reports “4-15 feet.” So which is it?

Those who read non-fiction often seem to have the impression that facts are facts. Period. The writer of non-fiction must merely learn them and report them, and that’s that. I’ve gotten this attitude often from children, egged on by the adults in their lives. “You wrote X, but we read Y in another book. Who is right and who is wrong?” Cheers for the author of truth. Jeers for the liars. But in reality, the depth of kingfisher tunnels (and many other facts) are unknowable. It might be instructive to consider how the figures above have come to light.

Over 200 or so years of American ornithological research, what percentage of kingfisher nests have been measured? I’d guess a sliver of a fraction of one percent. That alone tells us something: we don’t have a very strong sample here. And of those that have been measured, what fraction of the locations of kingfisher nests across North America have been measured? Another small fraction. Is there a wide variation in tunnel depths? It’s unlikely we know. Would different average lengths be found from Florida to Washington, from southern California to northern Maine? Possibly, but who knows? Are the tunnel lengths longer where the birds are digging into a softer material, shorter in a harder material? We don’t know. Or longer in one climate than another. It’s unlikely anyone would ever fund a study to find out, and probably for good reason.

So that’s a point: does it really matter? I can’t think of a good reason to study such a subject exhaustively. But if a question has not been studied in a statistically responsible way, we can’t really know the answer, can we? We can take a stab at it to get a general idea. So any of the above reported lengths is probably as good as any other. If someone found a nest burrow 15 feet long, it’s worth marveling at such a feat on the part of these birds. But overall it probably doesn’t make much difference whether the tunnels usually range from 3-6 feet or 4-10 feet, and whether the maximum is 10 or 15. So no one is out there doing studies to find out… and we may never find out.

My point is that facts are a much squirmier subject than many people realize, and it would be instructive for readers and thinkers to keep that in mind. One manifestation of this uncertainty is found in the common frustration at diverse and changing health recommendations. People blame science. I think they would do better to modify their expectations.

In an article called “The Fisher King,” in the August-September 2009 issue of National Wildlife, respected naturalist and author Les Line describes kingfishers and their nesting habits but does not mention any measurements for how deep their nest tunnels can be. Perhaps Mr. Line is onto something. But I do find myself wanting to hang some kind of measurement on the subject. So, I am willing to accept the varied figures I do find, knowing that no definitive numbers can be stated, and savoring a certain tantalizing deliciousness in the uncertainty.

As an author of non-fiction children’s books, I receive many letters from young readers. One that stands out came from a nine-year old girl named Lisa who wondered about the accuracy of various statements in my first book, How Much Is a Million? I was thrilled to receive her letter, for I am always happy to learn that my books are being read critically.

Lisa wondered about the truth of my book’s claim that counting from one to one billion (saying each number individually) would take 95 years. After questioning a few other statements in my book, she closed her letter:

“I had mixed up feelings about your book. That’s where the magic comes from the world of books. The magic of books is not knowing whether the facts are true or not.”

In my presentations at schools, I often tell children, “Wondering is wonderful.” I find it wonderful that Lisa is wondering about the truth of statements in my books.

I wish more readers of my books—of all books—would wonder about them the way Lisa does. Active minds read critically, questioning what they have read as the reader blends his or her own experiences, knowledge and observations with the author’s raw ingredients. Critical readers ingest a nourishing stew that is more than a bowl of information.

I feel privileged to have seen many examples of readers extending or challenging statements in my books. The members of a 2nd/3rd grade class doubted that the average height of elementary school students is 4’8″ (142 cm), as reported in the backmatter of How Much Is a Million? Using 4’8” as the average height, I had figured that average shoulder height would be about 4’, and I multiplied 4’ by 1,000,000 to estimate the height of a one-million child tower, which came out to about 757 miles (1,218 km): “If one million children climbed onto one another’s shoulders,” the book begins, “they would be taller than the tallest buildings, higher than the highest mountains, and farther up than airplanes can fly.”

The members of this particular class doubted that the average elementary school student is only 4’8” tall, and to prove me wrong, they measured every child in the school. They found the median, mode, and mean, and they graphed their data in several ways. Finally, they declared that the average height is only 4’4″ (132 cm).

But they didn’t quit there. Like a journal article by professional scientists, the report included a section devoted to reflecting upon their results. Scientists would call it the “Discussion” section. In it, the students wondered aloud if there were a legitimate explanation for the four-inch discrepancy between the average height I reported and what they found. They proposed some possibilities: Their school stopped at Grade 5. Maybe I used data from an elementary school that went up to Grade 6 or 8. That might explain why my average height was higher than theirs. Alternatively, their school could have been shorter than normal… or perhaps mine was taller than normal. Or maybe I just measured a single child and declared him or her to be normal! “He’s 4’8” and he looks normal,” I might have said, “so that’s the average. Done!” I find their out of-the-box thinking quite impressive.

In If You Made a Million, my book on money (using United States currency), I write that one million dollars would be equal to “a whale’s weight in quarters.” A group of children wondered if a whale really did weigh the same as four million U.S. 25-cent pieces. They looked up the weight of a blue whale (appx. 60 tons or 54,400 kg) and calculated that the blue whale’s 60 tons is the weight of about 10 million quarters or $2.5 million— not $1 million, as my book says! They wrote to tell me their results, and in my reply I pointed out that the book does not name a particular species of whale. It simply says a million dollars is equal to “a whale’s weigh in quarters.” And in the back of the book, where I provide the calculations, I specifically note that the weight of a million dollars in quarters (about 50,000 pounds or 22,680 kg), is “the approximate weight of many kinds of whales, including the sperm whale.” Then, as if anticipating their objection, I had added the fact that blue whales can be much heavier.

I thought my arguments had absolved me of error in their minds, but these students were not convinced. They sent me a color copy of the illustration in the book, with an arrow pointing to the blue-tinted caricature of a whale. Handwritten in thick block letters were their final words on the matter:“This is a blue whale!”

After recovering from laughter, I wrote back to suggest that they take it up with the illustrator, Steven Kellogg.

To me, the point isn’t who is right and who is wrong. Often it’s a matter of interpreta-tion, as in the case of the whale. The point is that wonderful things happen when children wonder about what they have read. They can pursue their wonders through research and, if appropriate, mathematical calculations or estimations. As nine year-old Lisa wrote, “The magic of books is not knowing whether the facts are true or not.”

It truly is magical.

For years I’ve been using popcorn to demonstrate various math concepts as I act out the plot, if you can call it that, of On Beyond a Million, my powers-of-ten counting book. The popcorn almost never fails to excite children from grades K to 5 or 6, whether they are urban or rural, rich or poor, white or black, X or Y.  On several occasions I dropped the popcorn from my presentation, but I had to put it back because it’s so popular. 

The fact that 21st century children go wild over popcorn as a math prop encourages me wildly. Why? Because popcorn is so simple. It isn’t a coveted, rare treat that they hardly ever get to see (or taste). They haven’t been barraged by commercials touting its pleasures. There’s nothing high-tech about my bags of popcorn, and no special effects. There isn’t even an on/off switch. Yet kids love it because of the way the bags’ growth in size appeals to their senses and their emotions.

Much has been written recently about the current plugged-in generation that can’t have fun without electric outlets at hand and electronic devices in hand. Richard Louv’s best-selling book,Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder, sounds an alarm that children who are alienated from nature suffer in many psychological and physiological ways. Elementary school curricula may teach students all about the Amazon rain forest’s endangered species but do not encourage them to interact with the natural world outside their classroom, says Louv. That interaction, when it does occur, has a wealth of salubrious effects.

I am encouraged by the popcorn. If kids can get so excited about something as simple as my popcorn, then there is hope. For instance, if adults simply expose children to “nature play,” they will drink in the benefits.

Something else without an on-off switch comes to mind: books. In recent years, pundits have predicted death knells for the paper-and-ink variety of reading material but I don’t see it coming. Like big bags of popcorn, books are too much fun to hold and behold. They’re going to stick around for a while. Furthermore, as an author, I find the popcorn factor instructive. It says I can stick with the basics. By basics, I don’t mean what that word has come to mean in the politicized world of education and testing. I mean the basic and universal emotions and responses in children (shared by adults who haven’t lost the basics). One of the most valuable pieces of advice I ever got from an editor was in reference to a fiction manuscripts, Super Grandpa, but I think it applies to non-fiction as well. This editor told me to “cut to the emotional core of the story.” The emotional core of powers of ten is that every time you add a zero to a number, it gets ten times bigger and that’s WAAAAAAAAAY bigger. “WAAAAAAAAAY bigger” is the emotional core. It’s exciting. If I can get to that in my readers  (or audience members),  I’ve reached them. Just pop up some corn and you’ll see what I mean.

Children love to guess. The opportunity to figure out something or to find objects hidden in illustrations, combined with a chance to show off what they have already learned, gets kids jumping (sometimes literally) with knowledge and joy. If an author can present good factual material in an enjoyable format that allows to children to take guesses, the author might have a popular book on his or her hands. It’s happened to me 25 times, with number 26 on its way.

In the late ‘90s, I wrote two dozen science books in the series “Look Once, Look Again.” They came out in two batches of 12 – the first oriented around habitats and the second around anatomical features of animals and plants. The publisher, Creative Teaching Press, predicted they would be in print for five or six years but it’s now been almost a dozen since the first series came out, and the “LOLA” books (as photographer Dwight Kuhn and I fondly call them) are still going strong.

There was nothing special about the idea, other than the interactive possibilities that come from children using both visual and textual clues to identify plants and animals. First they see a close-up photograph of an organism that gives a magnified view of part of its exterior (the plates of a turtle’s carapace, for example, or the kernels of an ear of corn). The text hints at the organism’s identity (“These are plates but you wouldn’t want to eat from them. What animal has hard plates on its back?” or “What has ears but cannot hear?”). And the child is on his or her way. Kids tear through these books and reach for more. With so many colorful covers, I long ago began to call them “book candy.” Unlike mouth candy, this kind of confection allows kids to think and have no-calorie fun at the same time, while expanding their knowledge of the natural world and, in a subtle way, encouraging them think like a naturalist — in terms of a creature’s characteristics.

As an author who visits schools, I have had the most fun when I’ve seen class projects derived from mybooks, including class-created books based on “Look Once, Look Again.” Typically, first or second graders have drawn close-ups of animal or plant parts and written clues about the identity, followed by drawings of the complete animal or plant and further explanation. In one school, the students went beyond modeling their work after the LOLA books. They invented fantastical animals that combined characteristics of various real creatures. It reminded me of one of my favoite Dr. Seuss books, On Beyond Zebra, which I first encountered on the shelf of one of my biology professors at Cornell.

Late last year, I published (with co-author Yael Schy, who is also my wife) a book of poems that hint about the identity of well-camouflaged animals found (if you can spot them) in the photographs (also by Dwight Kuhn). The challenge is to find the animal hidden in the picture and identify it from the poem. We adopted a unique design element in which the gate-fold pages open up to reveal another version of the same photo; the difference is that now the background is faded (thanks to the miracle of PhotoShop) to allow the hidden animal to stand out. Then come prose “naturalist notes,” identifying the animal and offering more info about its life history, its use of camouflage, and a few more photos.

Many readers, both young and older, have suggested that Where In the Wild? reminds them of I Spy and Where’s Waldo?. Our book hasn’t yet enjoyed quite the success of those (their illustrations are not limited by the true arrangements of objects in the world), but it has captured the attention of many readers and reviewers (and, I’m pleased to say, award committees–most recently the Animal Behavior Society, which just honored it with its 2008 Outstanding Children’s Book Award). Again, I think the hook is the guessing game format.

With great anticipation, I am waiting to see student projects based on Where In the Wild? Teachers and home schoolers: this is your chance to combine science with poetry. Please show me what you come up with by sending an email to (you know how to turn that into an email address). And all INK blog readers can post some of your favorite non-fiction books that use a guessing-game format. Why limit ourselves to science? How about history, geography, grammar, philosophy, math — there’s no limit! Aspiriing authors of non-fiction: it’s better than plastics.

Super Grandpa tells the true story of a Swedish grandfather who, in 1951 at age 66, rode his bicycle about 1,000 miles in the Sverige Loppet (Tour of Sweden), despite having been barred from entering the race on account of his age. As an unofficial entrant, he finished the course in six days and became a national hero, remembered to this day. End of story. Or is it? The story has many numbers that can generate math problems. To take a simple example, Gustaf, our hardy grandpa, rides his bicycle 600 miles to the starting line because he has no other way to get there. Then he begins the 1,000 mile race. Obvious question to ask a reader: how many miles all together did he ride? Less obvious questions: was the race itself twice as long as the distance he rode to get there? More than twice? Less than twice? By how much? More difficult question: The book says he rode the 1,000 miles in six days. On average, how many miles per day did he ride? Research question: if a 1,000 mile race started in our city, where might it end? Get out the map. Use the scale. Find several points that are 1,000 miles away. Note the distance between as-the-crow-flies miles and actual road miles. How about a circuit that starts and ends here. What are some of the cities it could pass through? Christina Nugent, mentor teacher and math supervisor for Dubuque Public Schools in Iowa, has written two mathematical lesson plans for Super Grandpa (for primary and intermediate grades), which can be downloaded at the publisher’s website. Here’s a caveat: don’t forget to let the story be a story. Read it and enjoy it. Then mine its math.

Ladybug, along with eleven other titles in the “Life Cycles” series, are nature books, not math books. Right? Not exactly. I’d agree that Ladybug is a nature book but, as in so many nature books, you can find plenty of mathematical learning opportunities. One of the photographs shows about 20 bright orange ladybugs on a bed of vegetation. Their spots can be seen and counted, and the number of spots per beetle ranges from zero to a dozen or so.

Along comes Patty Brown, an elementary school math coach from Freso, CA. Patty gives first graders orange cardboard cut-outs resembling the backs of ladybugs, each divided into two “wings” (actually elytra, a beetle’s hardened wing cases). The first graders also get ten yellow cardboard circles representing spots. They are asked to arrange the ten spots on the backs of their ladybugs. Every child in the class arrives at the same solution: five spots on each side. “Can we arrange them any other way?” Patty asks. No one budges. “Is five and five the only way to make ten?” The children resist admitting to any other possibilities. “How about this?” Patty picks up a lady bug back and puts six spots on one side, four on the other. The kids get it but they’re not happy about it. The symmetry, which they see as “fairness,” of five and five has a very strong pull on them, but eventually they come to discover and accept all the other combinations of numbers whose sum is ten. Patty writes each combination as an equation. Everyone is happy and an important first grade math concept has been learned.

In the Forest is one of 24 titles in my “Look Once, Look Again” series. In these books, readers look at a close-up photo of an animal and they read text hinting at its identity. Turning the page reveals the full animal and more information about it. One section shows a close up view of one antenna of a cecropia moth. The text that accompanies the “reveal” photo of the whole moth explains that its two antennae are its nose – a nose sensitive enough to allow a male moth to smell females three miles away. The second graders of Judy Baker in Vacaville, CA, found this interesting and a class discussion showed their teacher that they had no idea of the distance defined by a mile. And so began an extensive classroom project Judy called “How Much is a Mile?” in which 15 students taped together the paper yardsticks they had made earlier in the year to create a long strip of paper which they dubbed “Longie.”

At first they thought Longie would be a mile but they figured out it was only 45 feet long, and a little research told them that a mile was 5,280 feet. This led them to wonder aloud, “How many Longies make a mile?” They sought the answer by repeatedly adding 45 + 45, etc., but Ms. Baker saw a teachable moment and used the project as an opportunity to teach hows and whys of multiplication by ten. Excitement grew as they approached the ultimate answer. “It was time for lunch,” Judy wrote in an email to me, “but they had such momentum, they didn’t want to go to lunch!”

Building on Judy’s classroom experiences and adding some new technology, another 2nd grade teacher, Laura Bush, in Andover, CT, went online to pull up a high-resolution map of the local area on an interactive whiteboard. Placing the school in the middle of the map, she asked her students to imagine a male moth at the school, and to plot several points three miles from the school in order to see how far the moth could smell. Referring to the scale of miles, they entered points on the map; as more and more points appeared on the screen, a magical thing emerged: a circle. What an opportunity to teach the vocabulary of circles: radius, diameter, circumference, area, and so forth, and to make it relevant and meaningful.

To think that all that math started with a nature book.

New Visions for Linking Literature and Mathematics by David J. Whitin and Phyllis Whitin is more than a resource book about using math-related literature in the classroom. It does indeed illustrate a myriad ways that teachers can use a wide range of quality books to support both math and literacy. But note the word “quality.” In addition to providing examples (plenty!) and illustrating how teachers have used them (impressive!), it tells you how to judge mathematical literature. That’s where New Visions differs from any other resource book I’ve seen. “Many (math-related books) seem more like workbooks than stories,” write the Whitins and I agree wholeheartedly. “Some give detailed prescriptions for reading, much like a teaching manual for a basal reader, while others mask doses of ‘skills’ with comical illustrations or popular food products…” Bottom line: not all math lit is created equal, and New Visions shows you how to evaluate. It even shows why some books just don’t make the grade, and it does name names. Harsh! But someone had to do it.

The Whitins put forth four criteria as a guide for judging mathematical literature as worthy. They then select one book as exemplary, showing how it makes the grade in all four areas. More on that later. Here are their criteria with an example of a book that stands out in each category.

1. Mathematical integrity Stories and literature have enormous value when they inspire children to apply mathematical ideas to the world around them, but for that to happen, the math in a book should be not only accurate, but should be presented in a context that is believable, not forced; it should be presented in an accessible way; and it should “promote healthy mathematical attitudes and dispositions.”

The Whitins give several examples, including Ann Whitehead Nagda’s Tiger Math: Learning to Graph from a Baby Tiger, which provides both an exciting non-fiction narrative with photographs and statistical data from the true, suspenseful story of a motherless tiger cub being raised at the Denver Zoo. Data (such as weight gain over time) is expressed in a variety of useful graphs. It’s an engaging book that connects math to the real world in a way children find spellbinding — and educators find supportive of the standards they are trying to teach.

2. Potential for Varied Response. Children’s books should not be worksheets. Instead of being didactic, they should encourage children to think mathematically and invite them to “investigate, discuss, and extend… (and to) engage in research, problem posing and problem solving.” Readers are not directed. They are invited.

Readers of the charming Grandpa’s Quilt by Betsy Franco, are easily tempted to find their own solutions the problem that faces the book’s characters. The 6-square by 6-square quilt does not cover their grandfather’s feet so they must rearrange its dimensions. Children are likely to explore factors of 36 and to get a feel for the relationship between perimeter and area. And the mathematical “invitations” go on from there.

3. An aesthetic dimension “Good books appeal to the emotions and senses of the reader, provide a fresh perspective, and free the imagination.” Here the Whitins look at how well the written language is crafted, along with the quality of the visuals and whether the book actually inspires a greater appreciation of the wonders of the world (including the human world). To earn our respect, the words and visuals of a work of mathematical literature must be just as compelling as those of any other literary genre. Claiming “It’s just a math book!” doesn’t cut it.

In their unique counting book, Spots: Counting Creatures from Sky to Sea, author Carolyn Lesser and illustrator Laura Regan use vivid, evocative language and stunning paintings to inspire awe and appreciation of nature — as well as the mathematics that is so often useful in describing and explaining the natural world.

4. Racial, cultural and gender inclusiveness. My first reaction to this criterion was a bit dismissive. “Doesn’t that apply to all books?” I asked. Of course it does, but we should be especially careful not to let the
mathematical component of literature that perpetuates stereotypes blind us to an unfortunate sub-text. There is a huge push now to attract women and members of ethnic minorities to careers in mathematics, science and engineering, and children’s books can help promote equity. There is more to it than counting boys vs. girls or white children vs. black or brown children in the illustrations. As one of several fascinating examples, the Whitins sing the praises of The History of Counting by eminent archaeologist Denise Schmandt-Besserat, a non-fiction picture book that celebrates the contributions of many cultures over many centuries in developing diverse number systems.

New Visions for Linking Literature and Mathematics goes on to provide myriad examples of books for a wide range of ages, strategies for using them to teach math, and an outstanding annotated bibliography called “Best Books for Exploring.”

Now about that exemplary book the Whitins chose to feature in the opening chapter. I held off identifying it until now for fear of seeming self-serving, but in the interest of full-disclosure, I should say that it’s my book If You Hopped Like a Frog. I’ve written about it in earlier posts so I won’t summarize it now and it would really feel way too “me”-focused to list the ways the authors of New Visions found that it met their four criteria. Instead, I’ll close with a passage from an article published in Horn Book in 1987, quoted by the Whitins. I can think of no better summary of their feelings and mine:

“You can almost divide the nonfiction [that children] read into two categories: nonfiction that stuffs in facts, as if children were vases to be filled, and nonfiction that ignites the imagination, as if children were indeed fires to be lit.” (Jo Carr, “Filling Vases, Lighting Fires” Horn Book 63, November/December 1987.)

It was the poem about the coyote.

Wary eyes...

Ears are keen...

Sniff the air...

Seldom seen...

Crouching low...

In the brush...

Standing still...

Watching, hush...

Darkness falls...

On the prowl...

Rising moon...

Yip and howwwwwllllllll

One thing led to another and soon they had a plan to do it on Grayhawk’s schoolwide TV network while I was in the studio and the entire school was watching in classrooms. And there was to be a surprise at the end, when each child lifted a beautiful coyote mask to cover his or her face. They had worked for days on the masks; each one was beautiful and unique. The overall result: spectacular.

You can probably imagine what fun this was for the children, their teacher, the whole school and me. But here’s the important point: Those kinders are not going to forget this poem or facts about this animal (detailed, in prose, later in the book) because they turned what I wrote into something of their own.

I could produce a lengthy resource book about ways that classes have extended my books into projects of their own. Some classes have explored individual statements from my books (perhaps to confirm or dispute what I wrote). Some have created books of their own, modeled (closely or loosely) after mine. Some have performed sections of my books in various ways, or even enacted episodes of my life. Think of the differences in learning opportunities between simply reading a book and extending it into something of one’s own, something to be proud of. “Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, he’ll eat for a lifetime” goes the saying. “Read a child a poem a coyote poem, he’ll learn about coyotes for a minute. Give a child a coyote poem to enact, she’ll learn about coyotes for days.”

It’s a good one. It shows that the questioner is truly thinking about the writing life, and perhaps hoping for enlightenment that will help his or her own writing life. I have also noticed that the children who ask about writers’ block seem to be just a bit self-satisfied (some might say smug) for knowing about so sophisticated a concept. I harbor no resentment toward their attitude. I confess to having felt a bit smug as a child when I learned something esoteric, and I did not hesitate to bandy about my newfound knowledge.

But in this case, I am slightly troubled. It is not that children want to hear a few tips for getting the writing process restarted when it’s stalled. The problem is that, like many adults, they view writers’ block as a handy, even respectable, explanation for why nothing has been produced. It’s not me, it’s my writers’ block.

The view is supported by a hefty collection of books on writers’ block by authors who apparently conquered the ailment long enough to get the job done. In Outwitting Writers’ Block and Other Problems of the Pen, Jenna Glatzer opens by warning readers of a pestilence: “Writer’s block is an insidious pest—a beady-eyed rodent hiding under the floorboards of even the hardest working writers, waiting to rear its hideous head at the most inopportune times.”

For over half his working life, my father was a furrier. He operated a sewing machine on the floor of a factory in New York City. I have not asked him, but I’ll bet he would have had Furriers’ Block from Monday to Friday of every work week if he could have gotten away with it. He went to that factory and sat at that sewing machine so his son and daughter could have something to eat and a place to call home. My mother was an English teacher at Syosset High School on Long Island. She probably found the working conditions more pleasant than those my father’s workplace, but she loved to read, she liked to play tennis, she enjoyed Broadway matinees and word games and I don’t remember what else – and I’ll bet there were plenty of days when she would have relished a bad case of Teachers’ Block.

In my opinion, writers who regularly find way to pass their time other than by putting words on paper – a large subset that includes myself – do not deserve to take refuge in so dignified-sounding a condition as “writers’ block.” We should call it what it is: procrastination. And we should teach our children and our students that it is best conquered by force: Forcing ourselves to sit down and get the job done. Not knowing what to write and struggling over it is not writers’ block. It is writing.

On April 8, Garrison Keillor devoted his daily “The Writer’s Almanac” radio show to honoring novelist Barbara Kingsolver on her birthday. “She took a job as a technical writer,” Keillor said of her early adulthood, “which forced her to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day and do nothing but write. She later said, ‘I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writers’ block, oh, I have to wait for my muse.’ I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.”

In writing non-fiction, I have noticed a subtle way in which writers’ block manifests itself: over-researching. There is no bell that goes off telling a writer it’s time to stop researching and time to start writing, so the author having an “I-can’t-do-it” moment (the root cause of much writers’ block) can extend the research phase indefinitely. That’s what I do, and I must say it is very effective in its two main goals: putting off the moment when I must put words on the page, and enabling me to feel OK about myself for not putting those words on the page (since, after all, I’m partaking in the essential task of researching – never mind that I already have way more information than I need).

And now I must close this blog entry and get to work on the sequel to Where in the Wild?, tentatively entitled Where Else in the Wild? Hmmmm. Maybe What in the Wild? would be a better title. I wonder what Mom thinks. I will call her. As soon as I clean out the refrigerator.

I, too, would have been surprised early in my writing career if anyone had told me that some of my books were destined for use in classrooms throughout the grades. This has happened so often with How Much Is a Million? since its publication in 1985, that I am no longer surprised when I hear of fifth, sixth or even tenth grade students devising their own problems and doing calculations modeled after mine.

More recently, I published If You Hopped Like a Frog and a sequel, If Dogs Were Dinosaurs. As soon as Frog came out in 1999, it was déjà-vu all over again. The book explores the principles of ratio and proportion by comparing animal abilities to those of humans. To use the title example, a 3-inch frog can hop five feet, or 60 inches, thus hopping 20 times its own length. Applying that ratio to a 4’6″ child jumping proportionally, I came up with the statement that introduces the book: “If you hopped like a frog… [page turn]… you could jump from home plate to first base in one mighty leap.”

I love to see examples student work that derive from and extend my books, and Frog has resulted in a wealth of material from the pencils and pens of clever children guided by inspiring teachers. What strikes me is how the book is enjoyed and used across a wide range of ages, and how teachers across many grade levels have incorporated it into their classrooms to support the curriculum.

I will give a few examples of diverse student work related to If You Hopped Like a Frog but I am hoping that this post will open a discussion of books by many authors that are used throughout the grades. As much as any measure, a book’s ability to be appealing and thought-provoking to a wide age range could be (should be?) an indicator of success. I certainly feel successful when I witness the same book loved by five year olds and thirteen-year olds alike.

“If you flicked your tongue like a chameleon,” I write in Frog, “you could whip the food off of your plate without even using your hands. But what would your mother say?” (Something about bad manners, I suppose.) As with all the assertions in the book, a section in the back explains both the facts and the math. Kids are always asking me, “Is that true or did you just make it up?” Well, when you write non-fiction, I tell them, you’re not supposed to make it up! If they read the pages at the back, they can see why I wrote what I did and how I did the math. In this case, it is based on the tongue length in some chameleon species being half as long as the chameleon’s entire body. (In fact, there are species in which the tongue is several times the length of an individual’s body, so this is a modestly endowed chameleon we’re talking about.) When I speak about this book at schools, I love to flick out a red paper “tongue” as a demonstration, adding comments like, “Yum, I just love those fat, juicy flies.”

Without even approaching words like “ratio” or “proportion,” a first grade class in Fair Hope, Alabama, used this as the basis for exploring the concept of “half.” Each child was assigned a length in inches. He or she was to draw a chameleon of that length, then figure out half of its length and cut out a tongue from red paper to be attached in the appropriate place. At the end of the tongue, a fat, juicy fly was be affixed. Yum.

Fourth graders in Hanford, California, did something similar with their own heights except that they did the measurements in both “customary” (American) units and in SI (metric) units. (Finding half of a height in feet and inches usually proved harder than in centimeters – a fabulous demonstration of metric superiority.) Then they made tongues for themselves and assembled for a novel class picture.

In Nashville, fourth graders drew upon my example of a flea jumping straight up to an altitude 70 times its own height. (“If you high-jumped like a flea… you could land on Lady Liberty’s torch.”) Instead of each child comparing his or her prodigious high jump to a landmark in far-off New York City, they used structures in their own city, including the Ryman Auditorium (the original Grand Ole Opry) and the Bell South Tower (known to all Nashvillians as “The Batman Building.”) I like the way Genny calculated not only how far up the Batman Building she could jump, but also how far she would have yet to go before reach the summit.

At Marymount School in Paris, fifth graders got similar results but they compared their prodigious jumps to the heights of l’Arc de Triumph and the Cathedral Les Invalides.

In a most impressive class project, sixth graders in Hobson, Montana, created a class book modeled after If You Hopped Like a Frog. Each child researched the abilities of one species, found a proportional relationship between some ability of their chosen animal and a human, wrote and illustrated the text, and explained the whole shebang in detail at the back. (How cool is that?! This was their variation on the less inspired “animal report” that does little more than get kids to rehash an encyclopedia.)

The example voted by the class to be on the cover of this magnificent class-created book is “If your tooth was as long as a narwhal’s tusk…” I must refrain from editing it into the subjunctive to make it say, “If your tongue were as long as a narwhal’s tusk…” Never mind the grammar: this young author’s contribution is fabulous.

To appreciate it, I will have to summarize his explanation before telling you the rest of his sentence: A narwhal is a whale that lives near Greenland; it is approximately 20 feet in length. One tooth develops uniquely, spiraling straight out to a length of about ten feet. Hence, the narwhal’s tusk is half as long as its entire body.

The author of this exposition tells us that he himself is 5 feet tall, so if he had a narwhal-like tusk, proportionally, it would be 2’6”. Now I can provide his entire sentence: “If your tooth was as long as a narwhal’s tusk…[turn page]… you could roast six marshmallows over a campfire without burning your face!” How does he get that? He reports that he “did an experiment to see how close to a campfire I could put my face. The answer was two feet.” That means that the six inches of tusk hanging over the campfire would make a perfect skewer for marshmallow roasting. How big are the marshmallows? He says he measured them to learn that each has a diameter of one inch. Hence, six marshmallows could fit on the six inches of tusk positioned directly above the hot coals. S’mores anyone?

This particular class project included many other spectacular examples of creativity in concert with mathematical thinking (and magnificent art). One of my favorites is, “If you spit like an archerfish…” (this Amazon basin fish spits 16 times its body length to knock insects off of branches above the river; it can then gobble them up) “…you could nail the second baseman from home plate.” Please don’t try it at home. Or at school. But do the math. You’ll have to use the Pythagorean Theorem to figure out the distance from home plate to second base.

And you thought picture books were just for little kids?

To all the children who have had the courage to ask me a question of any kind, whether in writing or in person. I have learned much from you and I thank you.

Soon after the publication of my first book, How Much Is a Million?, I started to receive fan mail replete with questions. A short time later, I began visiting schools for author presentations and I heard many more questions. I began to realize that I could benefit by listening closely to the questions and thinking about what was behind them. I also realized that children could benefit from learning what makes a good question!

Students are over-assessed these days, but it is always their answers that get assessed. I think questions are at least as important as answers, yet only rarely have I seen a teacher provide guidance in the art of asking questions. The ability to ask good questions is a skill of paramount importance in many human endeavors and it opens the mind to countless wonders. In this post I am going to turn the tables and “grade” (well, comment upon) the questions that kids ask.

In the 15 years that I have been visiting about 50 schools per year, three top questions have emerged.

1) How old are you?

2) How much money do you make?

3) Where do you get your ideas?

Teachers are aghast when their students ask 1) or 2), but I answer both. After joshing “Less than a million” in response to the first question, I simply tell them how old I am. (Actually, I tell kids in the intermediate grades that I was born in 1951 and let them do the math – which sometimes results in my being over a hundred years old!) For the second question, I tell them how much (i.e., how little) money I make on the sale of a single book, and everyone is shocked.

Before I get to the third question, let me assess the first two. I think the age question is natural for children to wonder about, but if they had done research in their school library, they probably would have found my date of birth in a reference book such as Something About the Author. That’s OK—I don’t really expect everyone to do a research project before I get there, but I believe that well-prepared students (who have done research on the author and his/her books) make the best audience and ask the best questions. The other thing that makes this a mediocre question is that it doesn’t go anywhere. It doesn’t lead to follow-up questions, which are usually the best ones, or teach them anything that can propel them to further learning. What can they say after learning my age (other than, “Oh my God, he’s older than my grandfather!”) Perhaps a rule of thumb is that if a question is bound to be answered with one word, it’s probably not the world’s best question.

Despite teacher objections, I actually think the question about how much money an author makes could lead to an interesting answer, but for it to be meaningful I would have to spend a long time putting it in perspective by discussing how much various authors earn, and how those earnings compare with typical salaries in other careers (and the huge incomes of well-known celebrities). This discussion could go in many directions – for instance, why do a very few authors rake in enormous sums while the majority earn so much less? How is an author’s income determined? Here’s a “math guy” direction: given that a picture book author (who is not also the illustrator) usually earns a royalty of about 5% on a hardcover book, calculate the income on one book and determine how many books would have to be sold for the author to make a million dollars.

The third of the “Top Three” questions always gets the Teacher Seal of Approval, and for good reason. It can lead to discussions and thought-processes likely to go in many directions. The author’s answer can be applied to students’ own experiences and the students might be able to use the answer to improve their own writing. In most cases, the answer is not one that can be looked up in a reference book.

My answer to that question usually begins like this: “Ideas are everywhere. If you keep your eyes open, your ears open and your mind open you’ll find lots of good ideas. If you also wonder about the world, you’ll find lots of great ideas.” And then I talk about where the ideas for specific books of mine came from. Very often my books go back to when I was the age of the questioners. I tell them how, as a child, I wondered about things that came in big numbers. “How many hairs do I have on top of my head?” “How many blades of grass are on the baseball field?” “How many grains of sand are on the beach?” I drove my teachers crazy, but years later I turned those musings into How Much Is a Million?

When a child queried the origin of a machine that fills an entire school with popcorn in On Beyond a Million, I explained that I sometimes get ideas from other books. “My favorite book in third grade was Homer Price by Robert McCloskey. In that book, a donut machine goes out of control and fills a lunchroom with donuts. Well, I took the out-of-control donut machine and morphed it into a popcorn machine. The two books are completely different but I wouldn’t have thought of the popcorn machine if I hadn’t remembered the donut machine from Homer Price.” And then I try to bring it home: “You can do the same thing,” I tell the children. “Take something you have read, change it so it becomes your own idea, then use it in your stories.”

Look at all the mileage I got out of one simple question!

A few other things for the proactive teacher to think about in a class devoted to questioning.

* Children often ask questions that are way too vague. “What’s it like to be an author?” is a classic. How about reshaping it to, “What’s the most enjoyable (or frustrating) aspect of being an author?”

* Some questions are overly specific and basically trivial. I particularly dislike “favorites”: “What’s your favorite food/color/number?” I realize the kids are trying to get to know me as a person, and I like that, but does it matter that my favorite color is purple? Sometimes it’s blue. And I also like red! The truth is, I don’t have favorites. How about hobbies? I don’t mind being asked about my pastimes, but a good way to give it some importance might be to reshape the boring old “What are your hobbies?” question into “Do your hobbies relate to the books you write? How?”

“What was your first book?” and “How many books have you written?” are popular questions after my assemblies but they are absolutely terrible questions. Why? Because I have already answered both of them in the assembly! Perhaps the questioners weren’t listening. Perhaps they composed their questions before the assembly. Possibly both.

Which leads to my plea to teachers: Don’t encourage children to write out questions before the author comes to school. It locks the children into their questions, and they will mentally rehearse asking them instead of listening to the author and composing a question based on what has been said. Instead, practice asking meaningful questions as a response to something you tell them or read to them.

I will close with my all-time favorite question, which was asked by a second grader years ago. “Do you regret anything you’ve ever written?” What a fascinating question. I’ve always wondered what possessed her to ask it.

I told the audience I regretted a mathematical mistake I had made in my second book, If You Made a Million. Four hundred eyes riveted onto me. “What’s the mistake?”

“See if you can find it,” I replied.

I then realized that the silver lining in the cloud of the mistake is that kids get to do great math to find the error of my ways. And when they find it, they are triumphant. “Feels good to know we did right,” wrote a pair of students who found it together, “and the book has a boo-boo.”