Dear Ecologers, I know through discussions about education here on the list-serv that many of you are also involved in community outreach and education. Many of you are also balancing work and family life, with young children, and are therefore aware of the scare amount of scientifically accurate educational resources for the pre-K age group. When my son was born, I was appalled by the scientific inaccuracies in children's books - for example, giraffes and zebras do not live in "jungles", turtles and frogs are not "bugs", and polar bears and penguins are not neighbors. When I went looking for scientific accurate children's books, I came up with very few - an exception that I did find was the Backyard Books series by Judy Allen and Tudor Humphries. So I paired up with an artist-mom and we started a children's book series called Budding Biologist.
Our first book is now out in print, and is called "Am I an Insect?" The book uses a question-answer approach to teach the under 5-yr-old age group the major character traits of insects. This resource may help other ecologers with community outreach and education programs, so I wanted to offer a free electronic PDF of the book - just email me a request, since I can't attach it to the list-serv email. If you want a hard-copy, you can order one on our website: http://www.buddingbiologist.com/ , where you can also find more resources like coloring pages, and eventually more information on insects and other biological topics as we venture into other subjects (our next book is on habitat and adaptations of mammals). Cheers, Kris Callis
