Last week, I received a wonderful letter from a second-grade
teacher in Washington State. She was excited to tell me what happened when she shared
Whale Fall: Exploring an Ocean-floor Ecosystem with her class.
After reading it aloud, she asked students what they noticed about
the book. And one response blew her away: “The creatures start off big and get
smaller when there is less whale left to eat.”
What a great observation!
And—better yet—it led to a rich, lively conversation about food
chains and the circle of life. That makes my heart sing! I’m delighted the
students has this fantastic learning experience.
In books like Mega-Predators of the Past, the animals’
increasing size is a creative choice I made, and it’s integral to the text’s organization.
The book has a compare-and-contrast text structure and the animals are arranged
in order of size to reinforce the content.
But in Whale Fall, which describes a process, there’s a
built-in chronological sequence structure. The decreasing size of the animals
feeding directly on the whale is part of the natural process, rather than a
deliberate choice I made. That makes it even more exciting that a 7-yeard-old
noticed it.
Because the last few spreads of the book includes several different
kinds of microscopic creatures, one of the trickiest parts of creating this
book involved deciding how to describe their unusual behaviors and support the
explanations with art.
Rob Dunlavey’s fabulous power-of-ten diagrams are a key part of
making the technical information easy to understand. I’m also grateful to the
designer for typography decisions that helped to convey the meaning.
As a writer, I leaned heavily on text scaffolding. This technique
of slowly building understanding by using phrases and sentences as building blocks
was the perfect way to bring the unfamiliar, itty-bitty critters to life, so
readers could grasp how a parade of decomposers slowly consumes every last scrap
of bone over several decades.
Following a spread that explains how zombie worms—some of the most
bizarre animals around—begin to break down the bone, with the help of bacteria
living inside them . . .
readers get a breather—a spread about some slightly more familiar animals
that feed in more traditional ways.
Then we dive into another group of microbes with a long name and an
unusual way of devouring whale bones and then release gassy wastes that serves
as a source of food for yet another group of little-known creatures.
By introducing the creatures one at a time, using comparisons, and
creating images with strong verbs, the text—and the incredible art—introduce readers
to a hidden world and the creatures that call it home.
I’m so happy to hear that it’s resonating with young readers.
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