Author: Loree Burns

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USA Science & Engineering Festival

Later this month, science fans from around the country will descend on the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, DC, for a celebration of all things science. The second USA Science & Engineering Festival is a free two-day event boasting thousands of hands-on activities, exhibits, and presentations. I’ll be speaking on the Family stage Saturday, April 28 at 4:25pm, and signing books at the Signing Stage at 5:30pm on the same day. (Woot! Woot!) Come on by and say hello!

Find details about the festival, featured activities, the book fair, and all the featured authors on the official festival website.

SCIENCE ROCKS!

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My New Vinyl

That right there is a 33 ½ rpm vinyl phonograph record called Sound of Insects. It includes tracks like “Viceroy Butterfly Walking” and “Mud-dauber Wasp in Flight.” It is by far the most incredibly perfect gift I have ever received.

I got it from the Tech Old Timers, a group of retired former students, faculty, and staff at my almer mater, Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The Old Timers gather once a month on campus to socialize and explore new ideas through invited speakers. Yesterday, their new idea was citizen science, and their invited speaker was me.

I can’t even tell you how wonderful the morning was. It included conversations with old friends (Dean Trask! Professor Bleumel!), the making of new ones, the sharing of passions, and a reminder of just how long and deep and interesting and interested my WPI family is. At the end of the morning, the Old Timers gave me this album, and I am still—a day later—stunned at its aptness. I have no doubt that once I find a record player, the sounds captured in the album’s grooves will bring me joy; I’m a true insect geek. But it will also remind me, each and every time I play it, of the way learning transcends discipline and gender and time and age.

In fact, I can’t quite shake the feeling that I’ll be bringing this record back to WPI one day. Perhaps when I’m an Old Timer myself. I’ll drag along whatever beaten up old record player I eventually find, and I will tell my new Old Timer buddies about the day, back in the spring of 2012, when I hung out with the old Old Timers. I’ll recall the connections, share again the same funny stories I heard yesterday. Maybe I’ll know a little something more about beetles by then, and I’ll tell what I know. Eventually I’ll drop a needle onto Sounds of Insects and play a few tracks. “Japanese Beetle on a Ruse,” or maybe “Cicada Warmup and Flight.”

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My NSTA 2012 Deets

This week I’m putting the finishing touches on a presentation for the National Science Teachers Association annual conference, and preparing for a panel presentation too. If you’re planning to join the festivities in Indianapolis, I’d love to see you at one or both events. Here are the details:

How Can I Help? Empowering Students with Citizen Science
Thursday, March 29, 2012
3:30-4:30pm
Westin Indianapolis, Capitol II

As a scientist, a writer, and a mother, Dr. Loree Griffin Burns is committed to providing children with accurate, age-appropriate information about real world events. Drawing on her experiences researching and writing about environmental issues from ocean pollution to the collapse of honey bee populations, Burns proposes a formula for sharing these stories without scaring students: give them something meaningful they can do to help. From tallying beach debris (International Coastal Cleanup) and monitoring native bee populations (Great Sunflower Project) to tagging monarch butterflies (Monarch Watch) and hunting ladybugs (Lost Ladybug Project), Burns has practiced citizen science in her own backyard, coordinated events in her community, introduced projects into schools, and observed events from Central Park to central Mexico. In this workshop, she’ll recommend a variety of nationally organized and freely available citizen science projects, pairing them with trade books to help teachers promote both inquiry and literacy in their science classrooms.

Integrating Science and Literacy: A Journey, Not a Destination
Friday, March 30, 2012
8:00-11:00am
JW Marriott Indianapolis, White River Ballroom D

This session offers teachers and administrators an opportunity to learn from authors how to integrate their award-winning trade books into science instruction. Participants can get up close and personal with these acclaimed authors:

Loree Griffin Burns
April Pulley Sayre
Peggy Thomas
Pamela S. Turner
Sallie Wolf
Wendy Saul

Other presenters are educators who have served or chaired the NSTA/CBC Outstanding Trade Book Committee. Opportunities will be available to work in small groups with the authors and vetted activities will be shared.

Edited to Add:
In addition to the two presentations described above, I’ll be signing copies of Tracking Trash and The Hive Detectives at the NSTA conference in Indianapolis next week. Here are the details:

Friday, March 30
1-2pm
Indiana Convention Center
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Booth #1467

And get this: the fine folks at HMH are giving the books away, while supplies last. Come on over and get one; I’ll be happy to sign it for you!

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Snow? On Launch Day?!

Hello friends,

Ellen and I will be launching Citizen Scientists at the Harvard Public Library today at 1:30pm, as planned. The impending snowstorm, however, has forced us to postpone tonight’s launch event at the Beaman Memorial Library in West Boyslton. That event will now take place next Thursday, March 8 at 6pm.

Signing events in central Massachusetts over the next week are summarized below:

Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 1:30pm
Harvard Public Library
4 Pond Road
Harvard, MA

Saturday, March 3, 2012, 10am-12noon
Tatnuck Bookseller
Route 9 & Lyman Street
Westborough, MA

Thursday, March 8, 2012, 6pm-8pm
Beaman Memorial Public Library
8 Newton Street
West Boylston, MA

Enjoy the snow!

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Leap Day/Launch Week

Ellen Harasimowicz and I will be celebrating the release of Citizen Scientists with three public book signing events this week, two of which fall on Leap Day. If you’re in the neighborhood, drop in and say “Ribbit!” You might inspire me to do my American toad impersonation …

Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 1:30pm
Harvard Public Library
4 Pond Road
Harvard, MA

Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 6pm-8pm
Beaman Memorial Public Library
8 Newton Street
West Boylston, MA

Saturday, March 3, 2012, 10am-12noon
Tatnuck Bookseller
Route 9 & Lyman Street
Westborough, MA

All three events will feature a short presentation, a reading, and a booksigning. Hope to see you there!

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2012 Great Backyard Bird Count

© Benjamin Griffin Burns


This year’s Burns family Great Backyard Bird Count event was not the usual well-planned affair. Scheduling conflicts kept me from holding the after school birding program I’ve run for the past four years, so there was not the usual gaggle of children to invite. And I’ve only hung a single feeder since our move, making it unlikely that many of our usual feathered visitors would show up either. I decided a small count, just me and my kids, was the best approach for this year.

But then a reporter from our local daily newspaper called and said she’d like to do an article on backyard birdwatching and my new book. She wanted to schedule an interview for Saturday afternoon, smack-dot in the middle of Great Backyard Bird Count weekend. When I mentioned this, she asked if she could bring along a photographer and collect images of me and the kids counting.

Uh. Okay.

But that seemed sort of crazy. So many of our former bird counters are local kids, friends and neighbors we’ve known forever. The sort of people I could call last minute and say, “Please, please, please come over to my house on Saturday and help us count birds. There will be a reporter. And a photographer. And you guys are much cuter than I am!”

In the end, eight of us counted birds, talked to the reporter, and tried hard to pretend the man with the camera trained on us wasn’t there. It was a fun afternoon that will surely lead to a nice article. As a bonus, we recorded eight species of birds:

Sharp-shinned hawk (a life bird for almost everyone in the group)
Black-capped chicadee
Dark-eyed junco
Downy woodpecker
White-breasted nuthatch
Tufted titmouse
Northern cardinal
Eastern blue bird

And as a bonus-bonus, five more species, recorded over the remainder of the weekend:

American robin (28 of them!)
Blue jay
Red-tailed hawk
Mourning dove
American crow

I’ll append a link to the article as soon as it runs. In the meanwhile, tell me: did you count birds this weekend? What did you see?

Edited 5/17/2012 to add: Here’s the T&G article!

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On Tooting One’s Horn

In my spare time these past months, I’ve been organizing my rag-tag collection of business cards and teacher contact lists and compiling them—along with the email addresses of my friends and family and acquaintances—into a massive (for me) Email Marketing Database. It was an angst-ridden process.

Why the angst?

Well, for starters, I am not good at tooting my own horn. The very idea that I was compiling this database with the end goal of sending every person on it a few words about myself was daunting. Excrutiating, even. That said, I’ve learned over the five years since my first book was published that marketing myself and my work is not something that is going to happen effectively without my help. My publishers are wonderful, and they do a lot for me, but their resources are limited and they have many authors and many books to promote. If I don’t supplement their promotion with a little legwork of my own, fewer readers are going to see my books. And toot-challenged or not, I do want readers to find my books.

So I kept at the database.

There were other demons. I kept asking myself: Will Tom want to be in my Email Marketing Database? (Tom being a high school friend.) Will Jane think I’m being pushy? (Jane being a writer friend I know personally but not well.) Will Harry wonder why I’ve included him? (Harry being the neighbor I sort of know, but not well.) Doubts like these haunted me the entire time I was creating the database, learning how to export email addresses from my contact books, composing that first promotional newsletter, and right up until the moment I told my marketing program (Mad Mimi, if you’re wondering) to send that first e-Blast.

But send it I did.

And the most amazing thing happened: my colleagues and business contacts and teacher friends and neighbors and family members and random acquaintances and Toms and Janes and Harrys began responding. Kindly. And while there are a few folks who’ve asked to be taken off that marketing list (2 out of 940!), yesterday was filled with lovely email messages of support and congratulations from all over the world. In the words of an editor friend with whom I shared my database/marketing angst: “Let it go!”

And so I’m letting it go…

My third book, Citizen Scientists, was published yesterday. If you didn’t get an email from me, or hear about the release on Facebook or Twitter, feel free to drop me a line (lgb (at) loreeburns (dot) com) and I’ll add you to my new Email Marketing Database. If you did hear about it, please feel free to spread the love far and wide. And if you’ve already spread that love, thank you from the bottom of my angst-less heart!

PS: The lovely valentine graphic above was a gift from my son on Release Day. How cool is he?

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Leap Day Book Launches!

“What is citizen science, anyway?” So begins this journey into the surprising world of science for everyone, everywhere. Part job description, part nature study, and part beginner field guide, Citizen Scientists invites readers of all ages to think of themselves as scientists, encouraging them to begin by tagging butterflies, counting birds, identifying frogs, and hunting ladybugs…

It’s here! It’s finally here! My newest book for young readers, Citizen Scientists: Be a Part of Scientific Discovery from Your Own Backyard will be published on February 14, 2012. Photographer Ellen Harasimowicz and I will be launching the book in two public events, one at her local library and one at mine. In keeping with the books outdoorsy nature, and in celebration of the amphibians that star in chapter three (“Frogging in Spring”), we’re holding these events on Leap Day, February 29, 2012.

We’ll share the people and places that helped us create the book in a short, all-ages presentation. A book sale and signing will follow. Here are the details:

Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 1:30pm
Harvard Public Library
4 Pond Road
Harvard, MA

Wednesday, February 29, 2012, 6pm
Beaman Memorial Public Library
8 Newton Street
West Boylston, MA

Please feel free to help us spread the word by sharing a link to this post. And if your free, we hope you’ll come and help us celebrate!