Gwen Pearson

If you’ ve ever wished you could teach with tarantulas— or roly polys, or Madagascar hissing cockroaches— this is the resource for you. It tells how to help middle schoolers get up close and personal with amazing arthropods, the bugs that make up more than 75% of Earth’ s animal species. Adventures With Arthropods provides 26 lessons that are geared to middle school teachers and their students but may be modified to use for elementary school, high school, and even college classrooms and for formal and informal learning at zoos, museums, and nature centers. The lessons— many of which support the Next Generation Science Standards— teach students everything from anatomy, growth, and behavior to eating preferences and environmental needs of three arthropod groups. They also illustrate arthropods’ many essential ecological services, without which global ecosystems would collapse. Best of all, the book addresses teachers’ concerns about keeping arthropods at school. You’ ll learn which arthropods are classroom-safe and what’ s involved in caring for them humanely. Through Adventures With Arthropods, you’ ll discover how to choose species that don’ t require too much maintenance and are sure to captivate both your students and you.

“You’ll finish [Greenfield’s] book with new respect for color, especially for red. With A Perfect Red, she does for it what Mark Kurlansky in Salt did for that common commodity.”—Houston Chronicle Interweaving mystery, empire, and adventure, Amy Butler Greenfield’s masterful popular history offers a window onto a world far different from our own: a world in which the color red was rare and precious—a source of wealth and power for those who could unlock its secrets. And in this world nothing was more prized than cochineal, a red dye that produced the brightest, strongest red the Old World had ever seen. A Perfect Red recounts the story of this legendary red dye, from its cultivation by the ancient Mexicans and discovery by 16th-century Spanish conquistadors to the European pirates, explorers, alchemists, scientists, and spies who joined in the chase to unlock its secrets, a chase that lasted more than three centuries. It evokes with style and verve this history of a grand obsession, of intrigue, empire, and adventure in pursuit of the most desirable color on earth.