Weather or Climate?
Entertaining, Instructional, and Comprehensive
Weather or climate? Climate or weather?
Not quite the same but so close together.
Climate or weather? Weather or climate?
The difference is simply the way that you time it.
from "Whether It's Weather"
Grounded in the principle that children remember "90% of what they do in dramatic presentation," Weather or Climate? is the fourth book in the Brod Bagert's HeART of Science series--a comprehensive collection of dramatic content literature.
This poignant yet comical collection of dramatic poems, monologues, and short plays stimulates powerful insights into the mechanisms of everyday weather and the realities of long-term climate.
At the outset, the Sun, too busy to appear in person, submits an affidavit in which he declares himself the BOSS--"I expand the gases of your atmosphere and make the wind. I transform water from liquid to gas as the engine of your water cycle. I drive the currents of your oceans."
There's an understandably anxious electron who narrates her journey from part of an H2O molecule in a cumulonimbus ice crystal, to part of a "swarm" of free electrons that eventually form themselves into a lightning strike.
There's a clap-along chant that visits each step of the water cycle and ends with the memory anchoring "ACCUMULATION! EVAPORATION! CONDENSATION! PRECIPITATION! H2O! H2O! H2O! GETS NO VACATION!"
With scientific accuracy and knee-slapping fun, Weather or Climate? transforms the detachment of theoretical concepts into the immediacy of imagined personal experience. The journey concludes with the voice of a person determined to accept responsibility for the future because "... planet Earth's my home. I like it here a lot. Perfect? Not at all. But it's the only home I've got."
Bagert, Brod: - Poet Brod Bagert is the author of over eighteen books of poetry for children, young adults, and adults. A former lawyer and New Orleans City Councilman, Bagert penned his first poem as a favor to his daughter, who needed a poem to recite in a school program. Bagert realized that few poems written in children's voices were available, and so wrote one himself. Since then, he has helped change children's poetry in America, focusing on performance as well as the poem itself. According to Timothy Rasinski, a literacy instructor at Kent State University, Bagert's poems allow children to "create art" when they perform them. "Since he is one of the few poets to truly write in the voice of a child, it's easy for students to use his material for expressiveness," Rasinski told the New Orleans Times Picayune in a feature on Bagert. The Picayune noted that part of Bagert's appeal to children was his ability to capture their swirling moods and emotions: "Bagert's verses often feature the private emotions-raw, complex, humorous-of youthful characters he created."
