LIFE-SIZE CALIFORNIA CONDOR MODEL: Projects and Activities Inspired by My Books

Life-size California condor model.

During my nearly fifty years as a published author I have visited hundreds of schools to talk about my books and what it is like to be an author. I am always impressed by the creative projects teachers have done with their students in connection with my books. When kids do these projects it reinforces the concepts of the book and expands their impact. 

Over the next several weeks I will share some of my all-time favorite book related projects on this blog.

Life-size condor model:

The California condor is the largest flying bird in North America and has a wingspan of more than 11 feet. A third-grade class made this impressive life-size model with construction paper. Every single feather was cut out separately and glued on. Condor facts are displayed above. I'm sure that the students will remember creating the condor, long after my visit to their classroom. 

You can learn about the California condor and the efforts being made to save it from extinction in my book ON THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION: The California Condor, available as an ebook on Amazon.

FIVE NESTS ILLUSTRATION BY RUTH SANDERSON, On Display at the Free Library of Philadelphia

I was delighted to learn from my friend, librarian Carol Koneff, that an illustration by Ruth Sanderson for my very first published book, Five Nests, is on display in a special exhibit at the Free Library ofPhiladelphia. 

Carol saw the exhibit while visiting the library when she was in Philadelphia for the annual conference of the American Library Association. The exhibit, called Go Birds: Appreciating our Avian Friends, includes items from the library archives and will be up through August 30^th,  2025.

Ruth Sanderson’s illustration for my book depicts a rhea nest. (Rheas are large South American birds related to ostriches.) The rhea is an example of a bird species in which the male, or father bird, is the sole caretaker of the eggs and chicks. The illustration was donated to the library by Ruth.

A number of years ago I met Ruth for the first time at a children’s book conference. (We never met when Five Nests was published in 1980, which is not unusual.) After the conference Ruth sent me the original illustration for another page in the book that depicted Mexican Jays. In this species, multiple generations look after the young. In 2016, when I was in Philadelphia and learned that the library had a copy of Five Nests in their permanent archive, I donated that illustration to the library. I am pleased to learn that Ruth has donated other illustrations from the book as well.

Although Five Nests launched my career as a children’s book writer, it had a rocky start. It received a negative review in SLJ (unfairly, I thought) and as a consequence, many libraries, including my own, chose not to approve it for purchase. By the time Five Nests was named an Outstanding Science Trade Book by the NSTA/CBC the following year, it was too late. The book had already been remaindered. So I am especially pleased to see that it lives on at the Free Library of Philadelphia.

For more about Five Nests and the Free Library of Philadelphia:

My post on the 40th anniversary of the publication of Five Nests.

My post on the Philadelphia Free Library's Children's Literature Research Collection.

ON THE BRINK OF EXTINCTION: THE CALIFORNIA CONDOR Now Available as an E-Book

My book, ON THE BRING OF EXTINCTION: THE CALIFORNIACONDOR, illustrated with photographs by Michael Wallace, is now available as an e-book on Amazon. Originally published in 1993 by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich as a hardback and paperback, it documents the work of the Los Angeles Zoo and San Diego Wild Animal Park to rescue the then nearly extinct condor and restore it in the wild.  

The paper editions of the book have long been out-of-print. I thank the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association Condor Fund for their cooperation in bringing the book back to life as an e-book. You can download it to your tablet, computer or phone to read it. The pages will appear exactly as they do in the print book. Note that it cannot be read on a Kindle e-reader. (It is a print replica file and does not have reflowable text.)

 

AUTHOR VISIT AT ESPERANZA SCHOOL: Hands-On Science in the Natural Habitat School Garden

Principal Rumble with students in the Esperanza School Natural Habitat Garden.

Located at the edge of downtown Los Angeles, Esperanza Elementary School seems like a surprising place to find a natural habitat garden filled with California native plants. It is home to a variety of insects, birds and other wildlife. For the students at the school it is an opportunity for hands-on science as they observe the cycle of life through the seasons.

Welcome sign for my visit.

Since my first visit to Esperanza School in 2018 and getting a tour of their natural habitat garden I have been going back almost every year to meet with students and find out how the garden has been growing. Last week I met with third-grade students and their teacher Elizabeth Williams. We began in the library where I did a presentation about my books and what it is like to be an author. I was impressed by the students’ enthusiastic response and by their knowledge of the natural world. When I asked if they knew the word for animals that are active during the daytime, they knew that it was “diurnal”. Nighttime animals are "nocturnal".

Teacher, Mrs. Williams; librarian; Principal, Brad Rumble, in the school library.

After the presentation we all went on a tour of the habitat, led by Mrs. Williams and by Principal Brad Rumble. Recent rains had promoted new growth and spring wildflowers were beginning to bloom. Huge patches of lupins were sprouting everywhere. 

These bright red blooms are a favorite flower for hummingbirds. Below, lupin sprouts on the ground.

Mr. Rumble, an avid birdwatcher, has turned the students into expert bird watchers too. On our visit they spotted a number of species, including a pair of house finches. In class the students are learning to distinguish the differences between Anna’s hummingbird and the Rufous hummingbird. They told me that more than 80 species of birds have been identified in the garden.

Student discovering a small clump of wild grapes.

It is always a treat for me to visit Esperanza. It is a delight to see the students learning about the natural world and becoming young scientists. I thank them for sharing their knowledge and enthusiasm with me. And I thank Brad Rumble for his leadership at the school and in the community.  

The Schoolyard Habitat Program is sponsored by the National Wildlife Federation.

The Esperanza garden is a National Wildlife Federation certified Wildlife Habitat. The property provides the four basic habitat elements needed for wildlife to thrive: food, water, cover and places to raise young.

VIRTUAL AUTHOR VISIT at Verdugo Woodland School, Glendale, CA

When Mammoths Walked the Earth, Japanese and English editions

Last Tuesday I had a terrific virtual visit with the first and second graders at Verdugo Woodland School in Glendale, California, including two classes in their Japanese dual language program. I shared my book WHEN MAMMOTHS WALKED THE EARTH, which has been translated into Japanese, and my mammoth tooth--an exact copy of a real fossil tooth. 

Like elephants, mammoths had very large teeth, all of them molars and ideal for chewing the leaves, grass and other plant foods that they ate. 

 

 

We talked about birds and feathers and spread out our arms to measure our wingspans. I also read my book A ZEBRA'S WORLD and demonstrated how I make the cut paper art illustrations. At the end, the students had the chance to ask me questions. 

A Guide Dog Puppy, English and Japanese editions

Many thanks to the Assistance League of Glendale for sponsoring my visit.

SAVING THE PEREGRINE FALCON is now available as an E-Book

My book, SAVING THE PEREGRINE FALCON is now available as an e-book on Amazon Kindle. It was originally published by Carolrhoda Books in 1985 and is out of print. The cover has been redesigned but the text and full color photos inside are the same as in the original book. SAVING THE PEREGRINE FALCON is illustrated with color photographs by Richard Hewett.  I am happy to have SAVING THE PEREGRINE FALCON now available to new readers as an e-book. You can read it with a Kindle app on various devices (I use my iPad) or on your computer.

For centuries, the peregrine falcon was prized by kings and falconers, who used it to hunt. Bird lovers, too, have long admired the peregrine--which can reach speeds of 200 miles per hour as it dives for prey. Yet a few years ago, it was feared that soon there would be no more peregrines. Pollution of the environment with the poison DDT had interfered with the birds ability to reproduce. This book, illustrated with stunning close-up photos, chronicles the work of scientists at the Santa Cruz Predatory Bird Research Laboratory to save the peregrine from extinction. The peregrine falcon was taken off the endangered species list in 1999 thanks to their efforts and those of other agencies.

NEW CHICKS IN ROOM 6: A Classroom Visit

Four day old chicks. The thermometer monitors the temperature in the cage.

The children in Mrs. Best’s kindergarten class in Room 6 at Haynes School in Los Angeles have just hatched eggs, and now have five fluffy chicks cheeping in a cage in their classroom. Four of the chicks have brown markings. One is black. As the children waited for the eggs to hatch, they learned about chickens and eggs in my book Hatching Chicks in Room 6. That book follows a previous class as they went through the egg hatching process. This is a project that Mrs. Best does every year with her students.

Art projects done by the children. Some of the eggs they incubated had brown shells. Others were green.

Last week I went to visit the chicks and spend time with the children. I read some of my books and we talked about birds and eggs. I brought my ostrich egg to compare with the chicken eggs they had just hatched. The ostrich lays the largest egg of any bird. It is equivalent to two dozen chicken eggs and weighs three to five pounds! (My egg, which I bought a long time ago, has a hole in the end of the shell where the contents were taken out so it does not weigh so much.)

I learned about ostriches when I wrote about them in this book.

The incubation period for an ostrich egg is 42 days, twice a long as it takes a chicken egg to hatch.

Ostrich egg. It is the largest of all bird eggs.

The children and I also talked about birds that don’t fly, such as ostriches and penguins. Chickens can easily fly from the ground to their roosts. So, even though a lot of people think that chickens don’t fly, they do.

The chicks are already starting to grow wing feathers.

The chicks are growing fast. By the time school is out for the summer in a few weeks, the chicks will be ready to go to the henhouse, where they will finish growing up.

Author Visit with Kindergarteners at Westwood Charter School in Los Angeles

Westwood Charter School, Los Angeles, CA

Yesterday I had a fun visit with the kindergarten students at Westwood Charter School in Los Angeles, California, and shared my book Hatching Chicks in Room 6. It was an appropriate choice because they are also hatching eggs–except that they have duck eggs in their incubator. Several of the eggs already had pips so it won’t be long before the ducklings hatch. (Duck eggs take 28 days to hatch whereas chicken eggs hatch in 21 days.) I had a lively discussion about birds with the students, showed them my feather collection, and measured their wingspans. I found out that they will be celebrating Audubon’s birthday later this month. At the end of my visit I read the first two stories of Wiggle and Waggle and the children helped me sing the song.
Thanks to kindergarten teacher Sherry Kaufman for inviting me to her classroom. I enjoyed my visit.

National Geographics and an Urban Native Plant Garden at Esperanza School in Los Angeles

A week ago my 43 years of National Geographic magazines found a new home! Mrs. Oasay, a wonderful 5th grade teacher at Esperanza Elementary School in Los Angeles, is going to use them with her students. For many years I used the National Geographics for my research and I'm thrilled they are now getting a new life! Thanks so much to Principal Brad Rumble for helping to arrange this!

With Mrs. Oasay, Brad Rumble and Student with my boxes of National Geographics

After I delivered my National Geographic magazines at Esperanza, Brad took me on a tour of the school including the beautiful renovated library and the amazing natural garden filled with native plants, birds and other wildlife.

Principle Brad Rumble in the Esperanza School Garden

Bees were buzzing and a pair of doves was foraging in the plants along the path. Brad told me that two species of hummingbirds have been observed feeding on the flowers and that many other species have been seen and recorded by the children. The garden is an oasis in the heart of the city and a place where students can have hands on interaction with the natural world. This living laboratory is a wonderful asset to the school and to the neighborhood.
To find out more about how the garden project has impacted the whole school and the surrounding neighborhood, read Brad Rumble's excellent article Planting the Seeds of Change.

NEW BOOK! Hatching Chicks in Room 6, Official Publication Day

HATCHING CHICKS IN ROOM 6, Text and Photos by Caroline Arnold (Charlesbridge, 2017)

TA-DAH! Today is the official publication day of HATCHING CHICKS IN ROOM 6!
On May 12, 2014, I was invited to do an author visit to Haynes Center for Enriched Studies elementary school in West Hills, California, in honor of Amy Werner, a librarian who had worked for many years in schools in the area. After my presentation, Jennifer Best, a kindergarten teacher at Haynes, asked me if I had ever written a book about hatching chicks. Each spring, she brought eggs to her classroom and hatched chicks. But, she told me, she couldn’t find any books that were written at the right level for her kindergarten students. I said I hadn’t written any books about chickens, although I had written a number of books about other kinds of birds. I liked the idea of a book about hatching chicks, and a year later I was in Mrs. Best’s classroom learning about eggs and chicks and documenting the process with photos. HATCHING CHICKS IN ROOM 6 is the result of that project.

I thank Jennifer Best and her students for sharing their chick hatching experience with me. The children’s enthusiasm was contagious as they learned about chickens and eggs and cared for the growing chicks. I am extremely grateful to Jennifer for her wealth of knowledge about hatching chicks in the classroom. I couldn’t have done the book without her. I also thank the children and their families for their cooperation throughout the process. The fourteen chicks who are the stars of the book are now adult chickens. It was a remarkable journey watching them hatch and grow.
I also thank my editor Alyssa Pusey for her careful editing of the text, art director Susan Sherman for the very attractive and readable design of the book, and all the staff of Charlesbridge for their contributions to the project.

HATCHING CHICKS IN ROOM 6 is available as both a hardcover book and an ebook. For details click HERE.
For more about the book, go to the Hatching Chicks page at my website: http://www.carolinearnoldbooks.com/hatchingchicks.html

HAPPY THANKSGIVING!

Here’s a turkey from my folding board book for tots, Who Has More? Who Has Fewer? illustrated with my own cut paper art. It is wishing you a very Happy Thanksgiving! You can find this book on Amazon. It features seven birds–owl, dove, chicken, duck, goose, turkey and swan–and you can count their eggs on one side and their babies on the other. A companion book Who is Bigger? Who is Smaller? Features seven different farm animals.

FOLD THE FLOCK: Passenger Pigeon Origami Project

Origami Passenger Pigeon from Audubon

2014 marks the centennial anniversary of the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon. Once millions of these birds gathered in huge flocks across the eastern part of North America.  Now they are gone.To help remember the Passenger Pigeon, the Audubon Society is promoting the folding of origami pigeons as a symbolic way of recreating the great flocks of 100 years ago and raise awareness of the need to protect all our wildlife. A beautiful preprinted origami pigeon and directions for folding is included inside the May-June issue of Audubon Magazine.  You can also download a copy (for free) from the web at foldtheflock.org  or order sets of printed birds ready for folding.  Recently, my granddaughter helped me fold the pigeon that came in my magazine. When we finished, we logged onto the www.foldtheflock.org site and added ours to the flock.  As of August 3, 2014 the total number in the flock was 248,859.  By now it will be much more! You can fold yours and help the flock to grow.  Learn more about why Passenger Pigeons went extinct in the May-June 2014 issue of Audubon Magazine.

SOAR INTO READING with BIRDS

Caroline with Red-tailed Hawk, Goshute Mountains, Nevada

I love learning about birds.  My first published book was Five Nests, which came out in 1980 and was illustrated by Ruth Sanderson.  It was an easy-read book about five species of birds and their different modes of parenting.
Birds have been a favorite topic in many of my books and have always been part of my life.  As I child I used to get up early to go birdwatching with my father and for many years my husband, Art, studied birds in his research at UCLA.  My book, Birds, Nature’s Magnificent Flying Machines, focuses on flight and all the ways that a bird’s body is adapted to make it an expert flyer.
The picture above, of me holding a red-tailed hawk, was taken at a banding station on top of a mountain in eastern Nevada when I was researching my book, Hawk Highway in the Sky: Watching Raptor Migration (Harcourt Brace, 1997).  Every fall thousands of birds pass over this mountain top on their way south for the winter.  A few of the birds are caught, banded, and released.  My plan had been to spend a week at the site and take notes that I would later use to write the book.  As it turned out, the banding station was so busy that week they needed my help, so I got to learn what I needed to know by doing it myself.

For my Measuring Your Wingspan activity, go to my post for April 30, 2012.

My most recent bird book is A Bald Eagle’s World (Picture Window Books, 2010), illustrated with my own cut paper art. My older books are out of print, but you can look for them in your library.  My other titles about birds include: 

A Penguin's World (2006) Dinosaurs With Feathers: The Ancestors of Modern Birds (2001) Ostriches (an Earlybird Nature Book) (2001) On the Brink of Extinction: The California Condor (1993) House Sparrows Everywhere (Carolrhoda, 1992) Flamingo (Morrow Junior Books, 1991) Ostriches and Other Flightless Birds (a Nature Watch Book) (Carolrhoda, 1990) Penguin (Morrow Junior Books, 1988) Five Nests (Dutton, 1980)

Illustrator Ethan Long's "Hand Birds"

Last week I had the opportunity to meet Ethan Long, the talented illustrator of Ann Paul’s Iguana books (Tortuga in Trouble, Count on Culebra, Fiesta Fiasco, Manana Iguana) and many others.  It was fun to compare notes about today’s children’s book world and hear about his many projects.  Ethan lives in Florida but was spending several weeks in Los Angeles, working and promoting his new books.  When I visited his website I discovered the report of his visit to Pages Books in Manhatten Beach and the simple but brilliant art project he did there with the kids, turning outlines of their hands into lively birds.  The thumb became the bird’s head and the splayed out fingers the wings and tail. 

Podcast: Interview for ReadWriteThink with Emily Manning

In April, when I was at the IRA conference in Chicago, I was interviewed by Emily Manning of ReadWriteThink, Chatting About Books.  The interview focuses on my new book A Warmer World (Charlesbridge) but also discusses Global Warming and the Dinosaurs,  A Bald Eagle's World, Birds: Nature’s Magnificent Flying Machines, and Dinosaurs with Feathers.  A podcast of the interview was posted on May 16.  It is number 45, World of Animals.  The post also includes some terrific resources for kids, teachers and parents.
 
Questions that Emily asked me:
1.  An interesting fact that you give in your books is that “in the last century the average world temperature has risen more than one degree Fahrenheit.”  Even though this seems like a small amount, can you talk about the big impact it is having on wildlife?
2.  Another interesting point that you make is that while animals can move to new locations, plants don’t have that option.  How are plants adapting to the warming climate?
3.  What was something that you found out through your research of this book that you didn’t know before?
4.  What is one thing that a family can do this week that will help make a difference?
5.  You have written many books about animals.  What are some of your favorite animals that you have written about?

    It was a pleasure to chat with Emily.  You can listen to my answers to her questions and find links to her many other chats with authors at www.readwritethink.org/chattingaboutbooks .
 
Emily Manning has a master's degree in reading education from the University of North Texas. She taught in the primary grades for several years before taking a reading intervention position that focused on working with struggling readers in grades 3rd-5th. In 2006, Emily Manning began teaching reading education classes in an adjunct capacity at Texas Woman's University. And most recently, she has taken a position as an Instructional Specialist at Lee Elementary in Denton, Texas.Emily is a member of the ReadWriteThink.org Advisory Board. She also belongs to several professional organizations including the International Reading Association and National Council of Teachers of English.

ReadWriteThink is sponsored by the International Reading Association and the National Council of Teachers of English

StoryFaire, Santa Barbara

Authors Jody Fickes, Caroline Arnold and Joan Graham at StoryFaire, Santa Barbara, April 30, 2011

On a sunny Saturday two weeks ago, along with about a dozen other authors, I participated in StoryFaire, a day long celebration of books and the arts for families and children in Santa Barbara.  Kids could do crafts, art projects, get free books, buy books and have them autographed, and watch performances on stage.  Authors each had 12 minutes to perform on stage.  The challenge was to attract and keep an audience in the free flowing outdoor venue!  The key was to offer kids the chance to participate, whether in helping to tell the story (as Alexis O’Neill did when reading her book The Recess Queen), holding props (as Ann Paul did while reading her book Tortuga in Trouble) or interacting with the audience (as Erica Silverman did while reading her book Big Pumpkin.)  I talked about my book Birds: Nature’s Magnificent Flying Machines and invited children to come up to the stage and have their “wingspans” measured.  (Most kids were red-tailed hawks.)  Then I read the first two chapters of Wiggle and Waggle while two children acted out the story with my Wiggle and Waggle sock puppets.  You can see a sample of my performance in this video.  Enjoy!