SOL17 #29/31 - Two Days To Go!
And, Thanks to Alyson Beecher's Non-Fiction Picture Book Challenge at Kidlit Frenzy. Some say that our planet "earth" might better have been named "water". Seventy-one percent of the earth is covered with water. 97 1/2 percent of that is salt water. In the 2 1/2 percent fresh water, only 0.3 % of that is in liquid form.
I shared books that touched on the need for water here on March 19th, and today share two books that speak of the curiosity of people around water: both touching on eco-systems.
Through passion, people learn to persist. They have questions about so much because it’s fascinating. They find ways around obstacles. If this doesn’t work, then this! This story shows that was the path of Eugenie Clark, the woman scientist who broke barriers in science and in knowledge about sharks because she was so in love with this subject and the question of its stereotypes. From an early age when she raced to the New York aquarium and shared her knowledge to the time she founded the Cape Haze Marine Laboratory, she explored sharks. The book is arranged as Genie grew up with small pictures of notes showing her discoveries, like “Sharks are complex.” There is an author’s note with more information, and a “more about sharks” page. The illustrations are predominantly watery as you can imagine and mysterious in that murky world. The ocean is shown as you might imagine, dark and deep with shadowy shark shapes and other plants and creatures and there is always Genie “swimming with the sharks!”
I'm happy to find this at my library because it just came out a couple of weeks ago. This book swishes water again as Kate Messner has chosen to show a pond from above and below. A young boy and his mother glide around the pond in a canoe as they look. The words and illustrations show what is over and under the pond. In brief words, quite a bit of information is shared, from whirligig beetles that skate on the surface to the patient heron that waits for his bite of a quicksilver minnow. Twenty animals are included, and additional information about them and the ecosystem that is a pond is in the backmatter. As readers glide through their time on the pond, the pages darken, and night with its stars and the quiet movements of some nocturnal animals find the canoe gliding home.
There are more wonderful books that connect and teach us about water and its inhabitants, from microscopic to enormous. I hope you find one of these or another in order to learn what most interests you.