Book talk: Sharkopedia: The Complete Guide to Everything Shark

Sharks are awesome and are often misunderstood. Time for a true/false quiz to see how well you know your sharks.

Question 1: Bullhead sharks are known for their sluggishness/laziness during the day.
Answer: True [page 142]. They are slow and tend to stay in one place. They like shallow waters.

Question 2: Sharks bite surfers because from underwater, surfboards look like sea lions or seals or sea turtles, and those are some of sharks' favorite foods (for some shark species).
Answer: True. [Page 179]

Question 3: Sharks have only been on this planet for the last 5,000 years, so they're sort of a new animal.
Answer: False [page 54]. Sharks -- as they look now -- have been around for the last 120 million years, and prehistoric sharks existed 400 million years ago!

Question 4: There are nearly 500 kinds of sharks in the world, and of these, only about a dozen are responsible for a few unprovoked bites.
Answer: True. [Page 172].

Question 5: Nurse sharks are all white and have a little nurse-hat-shaped head.
Answer: Hahaha! False! You fell for that one? They look nothing like a nurse: [show page 36 to the kids].

If you want more cool information and photos about sharks, I highly recommend Sharkopedia: The Complete Guide to Everything Shark.

Booktalk to intermediate grades, middle school.

Cool, Smart Poetry: Booktalk 1

[Before you booktalk, put bookmarks in your favorite poems in case you want to read a few instead of doing a traditional “booktalk.” More charming poems here.]

Did you know that 99% of all species that ever existed are now extinct? 99% -- that’s pretty much all species! So the species that are still sticking around today, like us, are pretty lucky and amazing. [Showcase cover of book]. This book is called Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors by Joyce Sidman and illustrator Beckie Prange. That’s a tricky word – ubiquitous. What does that mean? [Take answers or guesses.] The glossary at the back tells us this: “Something that is (or seems to be) everywhere at the same time.” So basically, ubiquitous means something that’s everywhere – and something we are used to: bacteria, beetles, ants, grass, squirrels, and humans. All of these things have ancient ancestors. Take squirrels, for example.

[If you want, skip the next part, and just read the poem “Tail Tale” and then give your readers a few pre-rehearsed facts from the squirrel info section.]

“Tail Tale” is a cool shaped poem [show the picture]: squirrels have more determination and perserverance than we’ll ever have, and their genetic family is 36 million years old. That’s older than us, good old homo sapiens. In the world of species, we are the new kids on the block. Our everyday world is full of ancient mysteries, and history lives through those ubiquitous plants and animals. Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors by Joyce Sidman.

Ubiquitous: Celebrating Nature’s Survivors by Joyce Sidman, ill. by Becky Prange. Unpaged. Houghton Mifflin Books for Children, 2010. Booktalk to intermediate grades [3-5] and middle school.