Book recs...

[telophase]

...posting this for puppleball, since more people read my journal than hers:

I'm looking for recommendations for SF books (or something that fits the
guidelines I have to work under). Basically, At a recent meeting it was brought
up how our students don't read enough, so I'm looking at incorporating more
reading into the science honors class.

1. I need appropriate books (probably one novel each, or one collection of
short stories, or something) for 6th, 7th and 8th grade. They need to be both
age appropriate (6th-11-12, 7th-12-13, 8th-13-14) and level appropriate. While
this is for honor science, the assumption that the kids are higher level
readers would be false for my school as I work with a high ESL/At Risk
population.

2. I need to be able to justify the book with the TEKS (the essential knowledge
and skills the kids are taught). How would the book fit into the curriculum.
For those who have been out of middle school for a while, TEKS breaks down into
these broad categories for middle school: Nature of Science, Physics,
Chemistry, Life, Earth and Space. We also do a bit of Technology and may be
able to work some ethics into it, but not centered. Basically I need to be able
to build lesson plans around this.

3. Price=Free. It needs to be easy to get these from a source we don't have to
pay for, either donated from a book store or directly from the publisher.
Considering my student population, I think that's doable. That being said, just
one class set for each grade level is all that's needed. I'm the only 8th
honors teacher, there's only one 7th and one 6th (though I need to double check
about the 6th).

So any suggestions/recommendations? Recommendations on how to incorporate the
particular book is also appreciated.

Comments

[gameazel.livejournal.com]

- Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game
- Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle In Time

[arkanefyre.livejournal.com]

Haha, I suggested Ender's Game too. XD

[gameazel.livejournal.com]

*g* I remember reading it around that age for a literature program, and was stunned; my whole class was. For a few weeks I basically pimped it out to everyone I knew. XP

[octopedingenue]

I second both of these.

[arkanefyre.livejournal.com]

I'm assuming by SF you meant SciFi? Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game. I know he offers a section on his website especially for teachers and students: http://www.hatrack.com/research/index.shtml

The book is a easy read, I think, but best for Grade 7 or 8, depending on the level of maturity of your students. That said, it fits into TEKS quite nicely. The book talks about Nature of Science, Physics, Life, Earth, Space AND Technology. Chemistry too, if you squint hard enough.

[puppleball.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the suggestion. I think I have a copy of ender's game here I will take to school tomorrow and read (I've read speaker of the dead, but not enders). I've found several teachers guides that are helpful, though they approach more from and english class than a science class. It's also a TOR book, which hopefully they would be willing to donate a class set if I decide on doing this. I'm still looking at other possibilities as I have my 6th and 7th honors teachers to consider and would like different books for them so the kids are doing the same book.

[frith]

For your age demographic, I recommend Robert A. Heinlein's The Star Beast. In this book a boy struggles to protect his alien "pet" from the authorities. The story touches on responsibility, fair play, prejudice (having no hands = inferior) and the ethics of eliminating nuisances. Especially when the tables are turned near the end of the book.

I have no clue how you are going to get free copies of this book unless you appeal to libraries and used book stores for donations.

[the_rck]

I'm going to wander a bit as I try to remember SF books meant for kids that I liked in elementary and/or middle school. It's been a very long time since I last read most of these, so I don't have a lot of suggestions for how to integrate them into a science curriculum.

HM Hoover has some good kids' SF. I adored her stuff in elementary/middle school. I haven't read her more recent books, though (I'm 40), so I'm not sure about specific books. My favorite was The Rains of Eridan. It had some bits of interesting biology (as I recall). I don't know how they hold up as modern science.

I also liked The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey. Looking at Amazon, it appears to be out of print, so I'd guess that it wouldn't work. The science is definitely dated, but it addresses the line between programming and self-awareness.

William Sleator might have something. The one I recall best is The House of Stairs which is pretty distopic and deals largely with psychological programming. I'm not sure how well it would fit a science curriculum.

Jean Karl wrote some decent books, but they also appear to be out of print.

Laurence Yep has a book called Sweetwater about colonists trying to adapt to life on an alien planet. I liked it when I read it in 7th grade, and it appears to be in print with a new edition from HarperCollins in 2003.

The Mad Scientists' Club by Bertrand Brinley was always fun. It's not precisely SF, though. It's about a bunch of boys who play pranks using technology. I'd guess that it's quite dated by now, but it is in print (in hardcover), and it probably could be used to address applications of science through technology.

Eva by Peter Dickinson is about a girl whose brain is transplanted into a chimpanzee's body in order to save her life. It may be too old for the kids in some ways-- I have trouble judging that-- but it's listed as a young adult book. Some of Dickinson's other books might work, too.

Some of Daniel Pinkwater's books are technically SF, and they're all pretty readable, but there's little science in them, so I don't think they can be justified.

It might be worth looking into the Danny Dunn books by Jay Williams. I recall them as easy reads with a bit of science. Judging by Amazon, though, they're out of print.

Danny Dunn!

[frith]

Danny Dunn and the Anti-gravity Paint! 8^) I read that when I was in grade 5 or 6. Good book. Around the same time I read Pagoo (life cycle of a hermit crab), Norse mythology and a slew of Enid Blyton The *** of Adventure books, none of which were scifi. I also read Jules Verne's Around the World in Eighty Days, Voyage to the Center of the Earth and the moon-launch one. The later two would qualify somewhat as scifi, but really really old school scifi.

[octopedingenue]

Holes by Louis Sachar contains strong elements of magical realism. It's not focused on science specifically, but it's set in the Texas desert and contains a lot of detail about desert landscapes and wildlife (some of it accurate, some of it exaggerated)--I can easily see structuring a desert geology or biology unit around it. Also, I love the book to death.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

YA SF books with real science in them, eesh. Not that easy.

As far as I know these are all still in print:

William Sleator writes a broad spectrum, from hard SF to horror to fantasy. Two particularly science-y books are
1. Strange Attractions
Time travel, alternate universes, bifurcation theory.
2. The Boy Who Reversed Himself
Molecular structure.

I triply recommend him because his hard SF book are very pure speculation, couched in simple language. A couple other books that come to mind are:

Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH by Patrick O'Brian
Laboratory conditions, nature of intelligence

The A.I. Gang Trilogy by Bruce Coville
Artificial Intelligence, lots of incidental information

Scorpion Shards by Neal Shisterman
Probability, psychology, microbiology...not particularly accurate, because it's a book about having science-based superpowers, but the concepts are there.

Hrmmm, I have to think about this.

[octopedingenue]

OMG Scorpion Shards! I thought I had imagined that book! Was there ever a sequel?

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

It's a trilogy! The sequals are Thief of Souls and Shattered Sky. In ToS a psychic alien parasite tries to set the remaining kids up as Gods and there's some cult leader stuff centered around Dillon. Horribly, I can't remember the plot of SS. I know I was disappointed by the ending, though it does wrap up the plot.

My feeling for this series can basically be sumarized by DILLON DILLON DILLON and the sick fascination of reading a series where everything seems to go wrong, over and over and over again.

[sub-divided.livejournal.com]

*Neal Shusterman.

Orson Scott Card has also written WYRMS, which is science fiction disguised as fantasy. You read it as a simple quest novel, but the underlying cause of everything is science, not magic. I remember animal biology, intelligence-as-a-function-of-biology, and something on memory in there. This is a long book though.

[rayechu.livejournal.com]

I am also suggesting Ender's Game because there is a movie coming out as well, and many times that can be a good motivator. I'm not really good at age-related recommendations so I can just throw some titles out.

The Wrinkle in Time can be really interesting or really boring, depending on how you treat the book.
Jurassic Park could be an interesting read.
If that is too big what about Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH? Or possibly The Time Machine?

[mothoc.livejournal.com]

Coyote by Allen Steele. It's a thickign book, but the book is really a collection of short stories that were originally printed in Asimov's and a few other periodicals, so it would be pretty easy to pick and choose different short stories to read to suit to time. It's a space exploration book about building a new civilization on a newly discovered planet.

[jenny-islander.livejournal.com]

The hard science fiction story I remember best from that age is "The Cold Equations" by Tom Godwin; it made the costs of space travel brutally clear and awakened a lifelong interest in artificial habitats. I also creeped myself out with Lovecraft's "The Color out of Space," which is supposed to be a pretty good description of radiation poisoning for the time (at least, so I'm told; comparing it with the actual ecological conditions near Chernobyl might be interesting). Asimov's Lucky Starr books are good stuff, but the planetary science is hopelessly outdated; titles include Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus. The best Lucky Starr book to use for the purpose might be the one set on Mercury, which examines conditions on a planet that does not rotate.