MAYBE YOU!
Poems and Plays For Science as Inquiry
This book comes with a video recording of the author, Brod Bagert, modeling the performance of each piece to empower students to create their own dramatic performances.
Young minds will shift into overdrive as they encounter the history, philosophy, and principles of scientific inquiry all irresistibly packed in this poignant yet comical collection of dramatic poems, monologues, and short plays. Calling on the time-honored principle that children remember “90% of what they do in dramatic presentation,” Maybe You! is the first book in the long-awaited Brod Bagert’s HeART of Science series, providing parents, teachers, and young learners with a comprehensive compendium of dramatic content literature, both entertaining and instructional.
SYSTEMATIC ME
Poems and Plays About the Human Body
This book comes with a video recording of the author, Brod Bagert, modeling the performance of each piece to empower students to create their own dramatic performances.
The natural inquisitiveness of young minds will take flight as they meet, live and in person, the celebrities of the human body-the cells, organs, and systems that together maintain homeostasis. Grounded in the long-standing principle that children remember “90% of what they do in dramatic presentation,” this poignant yet comical collection of dramatic poems, monologues, and plays makes the study of the human body a thing of joy. A cookie hilariously describes every step of its teeth-to-toilet journey through a human digestive system. A spunky child virus ignores its mother’s horrific warnings with disastrous consequences as it runs face-to-face into the denizens of a human child’s immune system.
MY HOME IN THE UNIVERSE
Poems and Plays For Space Science
This book comes with a video recording of the author, Brod Bagert, modeling the performance of each piece to empower students to create their own dramatic performances.
This poignant yet comical collection of dramatic poems, monologues, and short plays creates a delightfully unique experience of the Universe. Nerd-One Alvin Lofton captures the attention of young Roshanda Hale with a love poem about red giants, a super nova, and “cosmic furnaces ablaze in the boundless black of space.” Ms. Mariana Moon, in an interview with talk-show host Isaac Cosmos, reveals her feelings about living in the shadow of a lunar eclipse and the joy of payback when she gets to reciprocate during a solar eclipse— “little-ole me blocking out…that big ball of blazing hydrogen.” Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton are likened to Fantastic Four superheroes for their brilliance and courage in bringing about the Copernican Revolution. From cosmic dust, to Hydrogen Fusion, to the all-consuming gravity of black holes, My Home in the Universe transforms the detachment of theoretical concepts into the immediacy of imagined personal experience—accurate, emotional, and entertaining. The journey concludes with the voice of an unnamed star who declares that “in this ocean of eternal night, I make day. I burn to give this light away and in burning earn the right to say—I am a star.”
Weather or Climate?
Poems and Plays about Weather and Climate
`This book is about weather and climate, which some of you may already know are not the same thing, even though they are very closely related. So let’s start with weather.
The best thing about weather science is that you experience weather every day, and understanding something you experience every day makes each day more interesting. This book is packed with all the information you need to understand climate and weather. When you see a cloud in the sky, it’s not just any cloud, it’s a particular kind of cloud, it’s got a name, and you’ll learn all about it. You’ll understand why wind makes you feel colder in winter and why humidity makes you feel hotter in summer. The awesome spectacle of a lightening storm will be even more awesome when you understand what’s happening inside those clouds to make all that electricity.
Knowing the basics of weather science is just plain fun, but climate is another
thing entirely. There is no longer any question that Earth’s climate is changing, but there are a bunch of questions about what we should be doing about it, real questions that require hard decisions. Most of you will not become climate-change scientists, but all of you will be part of making those decisions, which is why it’s important that you understand the complexities of weather science. How important? Really-really-really important.
Here is something to think about. Hurricanes are weather and they’re a big deal. My first memory of a hurricane goes way back to the year I started first grade. School was cancelled, there was a feeling of magic in the air, big oak tree branches shook in the wind—it was very exciting, and I remember being a little disappointed when the hurricane changed course and missed us entirely.
But the gradual increase in average global temperature is climate, and it’s a very big deal, bigger than a thousand hurricanes, and it’s not the kind of thing that can just change course and go away. It has already begun, and you are already a part of deciding what we do about it. It’s important stuff, and I’m hoping this book will make learning about it, talking about it, living it, and predicting it, electrifying.
