The End

I recently published my first edited book,  Labor of Love: A Literary Mama Staff Anthology ,  with  Small Harbor Publishing . It's an anthology of writing from  Literary Mama  staff over the past 20 years. It's a beautiful collection and I am proud of the writers and proud to share the book.  It seems a fitting moment, as I pondered sharing about the book here on the blog, to reflect on my life as a blogger, and acknowledge that it is time to officially end this blog.   I started blogging in about 2007, when my baby was learning to toddle, when I was learning how to be a mother and stepmother, when I was just starting to see my way as a writer. I needed it back then. I craved it. I had a variety of blog iterations--family, art, creativity, writing things I delved into. There's a freedom in blogging, a casualness, an easy familiarity that's lacking (for me anyway) in other kinds of writing. I loved blogging and the words came pouring out.  Ove...
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Galileo's Leaning Tower Experiment

What I love about science is that it is accessible to anyone. Any interested student can observe the world around them, create theories and test those ideas. Wendy Macdonald's Galileo's Leaning Tower Experiment, illustrated by Paolo Rui, is a picture book that invites readers into that world of observation. Here, learning science is not some foreign, exclusive club that only a chosen few get to study, rather, readers, both young and old, can participate.

 Galileo's Leaning Tower Experiment is about a young, fictional, boy name Massimo, who is interested in the speed at which things fall. He meets Galileo, a professor at the University of Pisa in 1589, and the two work to figure out if Aristotle's previous theory was wrong.

 Legend has it that Galileo dropped things off the Leaning Tower of Pisa to prove his new theory, which displaced Aristotle's old theory. It is this event that the picture book centers on. But throughout the book, as Massimo and Galileo theorize, experiment, and make deductions, they show the reader how science works. It's this progression of deductive thinking that makes this book resonate as more than just a recounting of an old story. 

 This is what a nonfiction picture book should do, engage children (or us older readers) so that they feel they are not being preached to, or lectured, or bored by irrelevant historical information. Macdonald is highly successful with that. In the course of 32 pages, the characters drop many things to compare their speed. By the end, I got up and started dropping things. Just so I could participate too.
STEM FridayIt's STEM Friday! Science Technology, Engineering and Math.

Comments

Sue Heavenrich said…
what a cool book! I didn't know about it, so thanks for sharing it. Now I don't feel so guilty about having my kids drop things to see how they float/fall/splat....
October 18, 2014 at 9:14 AM
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