Goodreads says:
Did you know manatees swim using farts? Or that herrings communicate by passing gas?
Butts are used for breathing, eating, swimming, talking, and even killing in the animal kingdom. Focusing on ten different animals and their derrières, and offering fun facts about their origin, habitat, and "posterior power," this hilarious book captures the wonder of our ecosystem. Which animal has the coolest butt power? That's up to you to decide!
I got this book from the library after following the author on TikTok. I didn't read all of it - but I did read the instructor tips. His TikTok account is a brilliant way to share good tips from the book as well a the other things he knows about the science of learning.
The thing about this book is that it is full of great tips - but I don't know if people who struggle in school read these kinds of books. The "for the instructor" of each section was really good too. My wish is for everyone to enjoy and do well in school and his book is a great tool for making that happen.
In the chapter, "How to Read Difficult Books" he made me feel good about my habit of note taking when I read non-fiction books. Most, I get from the library so I can't highlight them. Instead I write notes and he says that is a great learning strategy. Yay! He says taking notes keeps you mentally on task and the notes will help refresh your memory later. He also suggests posting a question when you begin a section of a book...and then when you finish that section, go back and see if your question was satisfactorily answered and whether or not you caught the gist of the section.
Goodreads says:
In this revolutionary, comprehensive, and accessible guide on how the brain learns, discover how to study more efficiently and effectively, shrug away exam stress, and most of all, enjoy learning.
When we study, we tend to focus on the tasks we can most easily control—such as highlighting and rereading—but these practices only give the illusion of mastery. As Dan Willingham, professor of psychology and bestselling author, explains, familiarity is not the same as comprehension.
Perfect for teachers and students of all ages, Outsmart Your Brain provides real-world practices and the latest research on how to train your brain for better learning. Each chapter provides clear and specific strategies while also explaining why traditional study processes do not work. Grounded in scientifically backed practical advice, this is the ultimate guide to improving grades and better understanding the power of our own brains.
I actually put this one in the recycling. Crazy!
Goodreads says nothing about this book either! Weird.
Emma McKenna can’t wait for third grade at the brand-new Curiosity Academy. She’ll have a cool teacher who wears high-tops and science earrings. She’ll meet interesting classmates from all over Peppermint Falls. Best of all, she’ll get a fresh start after last year’s talent-show disaster left her with that awful nickname. It’s going to be the best year ever!
Then Lucy walks into Mrs. Z’s room.
Lucy, Emma’s best-friend-turned-enemy.
Lucy, who gave Emma that nickname and spread it all over school!
Emma’s fresh start is doomed . . . unless she can make friends before Lucy ruins everything.
So Emma sets out to be pals with everyone, just like her favorite animal, the capybara. As her classmates argue over the choice of a new school mascot, Emma stays quiet and doesn’t pick sides. (The last thing she needs is another enemy.) But maybe speaking up could be the thing that helps her really connect with her class—and saves her at last from third-grade doom.
Both sweetly poignant in its attention to kids’ worries and friendships and laugh-out-loud funny in its storytelling, with black-and-white illustrations throughout by Pura Belpré Honor artist Kat Fajardo, Emma McKenna, Full Out is the perfect launch for the exciting new Kids in Mrs. Z’s Class chapter-book series.
This book had me captivated. It's a good page turner. I finished the last half of it in one sitting. Loved it.
Quotes:
p. 54 I wish we were being broadcast live on every channel and smartphone in the world so everyone could see what they're allowing to happen to children.
p. 306 "Fear and dread run high in Syria. They're enhanced in you, which is why you see me. It's safe to presume you won't have these same horrors in Germany. So why would I follow you there?"
(character speaking is Khawf....who is fear)
p. ? “When I die, I'm going to tell God everything.” (a child who passes away due to war)
Goodreads says:
Salama Kassab was a pharmacy student when the cries for freedom broke out in Syria. She still had her parents and her big brother; she still had her home. She had a normal teenager’s life.
Now Salama volunteers at a hospital in Homs, helping the wounded who flood through the doors daily. Secretly, though, she is desperate to find a way out of her beloved country before her sister-in-law, Layla, gives birth. So desperate, that she has manifested a physical embodiment of her fear in the form of her imagined companion, Khawf, who haunts her every move in an effort to keep her safe.
But even with Khawf pressing her to leave, Salama is torn between her loyalty to her country and her conviction to survive. Salama must contend with bullets and bombs, military assaults, and her shifting sense of morality before she might finally breathe free. And when she crosses paths with the boy she was supposed to meet one fateful day, she starts to doubt her resolve in leaving home at all.
Soon, Salama must learn to see the events around her for what they truly are—not a war, but a revolution—and decide how she, too, will cry for Syria’s freedom.
I've noticed Shawn Anchor mentioned a lot when it comes to talking about happiness. He hit the nail on the head with this book! I can't remember what led me to this book, but I was I pleasantly surprised and the more I read the more I loved it. My word of the year is "swing". I wrote about it here. I was able to add a lot to my cache about the value of swing by reading this!
My notes are below the Goodreads summary.
Goodreads says:
“With cutting-edge research, penetrating insights, and practical examples, Shawn Achor describes a new conception of ‘success,’ and in doing so, reveals exciting new strategies we can use to meet our highest potential.”—Gretchen Rubin, bestselling author of The Happiness Project
“A vibrant book on how to bring out the best in others—and how they can bring out the best in us.”—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast WorkLife
In a world that thrives on competition and individual achievement, we’re measuring and pursuing potential incorrectly. Pursuing success in isolation—pushing others away as we push ourselves too hard—not only limits our potential but makes us more stressed and disconnected than ever.
Harvard-trained researcher Shawn Achor reveals a better approach. With exciting new research combining neuroscience and psychology with Big Data, Achor shows that our potential is not limited by what we alone can achieve. Instead, it is determined by how we complement, contribute to, and benefit from the abilities and achievements of people around us.
When we—as individuals, leaders, and parents—chase only individual achievement, we leave vast sources of potential untapped. But once we put “others” back into the equation, and work to make others better, we ignite a Virtuous Cycle of cascading successes that amplify our own.
The dramatic shifts in how we approach work today demand an equally dramatic shift in our approach to success. In Big Potential, Achor draws on cutting-edge original research as well as his work with nearly half of the Fortune 100 and with places like NASA, the NFL and the NBA, and offers a new path to thriving in the modern world.
Notes
p. 1 When dusk slowly crept upon a mangrove forest lining a river deep in a jungle in Southeast Asia, a biologist far from his home in Washington State looked out over the lush, alien landscape lining the snake-infested waters. While drifting slowly in his boat, Professor Hugh Smith surely heard the calls of the nocturnal creatures uncoiling from their dens or taking flight from their nests and beginning their nightly hunts. I can envision how the water must have shimmered under the light from the stars, unspoiled by the light pollution that existed in the remote cities. What happened next on that humid day in 1935 is part of recorded academic history. Smith looked up at one of the mangrove trees, and suddenly the entire canopy glowed as if a lightning bolt had show out from the tree instead of striking it. Then it all went dark, leaving a burned image on his vision....once his capacity for mental reasoning returned, he realized that the trees were not, in fact, glowing; rather they were covered with a critical number of bioluminiescent lightning bugs, all illuminating at the exact same time. Upon returning home, Dr Smith wrote up a journal article on his discovery of the synchronous lightning bugs. It seemed too good to be true, like something out of a storybook. I'm sadly unsurprised by the next part of the story. He was not believed. Biologists ridiculed his account, even calling it fabricated. Why would make fireflies glow in unison, which would only decrease their chances of distinguishing themselves to potential mates? Mathematicians were equally skeptical. How could order come from chaos in nature without a leader to direct it? And entomologists asked how million of fireflies could see enough other fireflies to create the exact same pattern, given the limited visibility i the mangrove forest. It seemed physically, mathematically, and biologically impossible.
Yet, it wasn't. And thanks to modern science, we know how and why. Turns out that this puzzling behavior actually serves an evolutionary purpose for the fireflies. As published in the prestigious journal Science, researchers Moiseff and Copeland found that when lightning bugs light up at randome times, the likelihood of a female responding to a male in the deep, dark recesses of a mangrove forest is 3 percent. But when the lightning bugs light up together, the likelihood of females responding is 82%! That's not a typo. The success rate increased by 79 percentage points when flashing as an interconnected community rather than as individuals.
The lightning bug researchers discovered than when fireflies were able to time their pulses with one another with astonishing accuracy (to the millisecond!), it allowed them to space themselves apart perfectly, thus eliminating the need to compete. ...Like the lightning bugs, once we learn to coordinate and collaborate with those around us, we all begin to shine brighter, both individually and as an ecosystem.
p. 23...almost every attribute of your potential - from intelligence ot creativity to leadership to personality and engagement - is interconnected with others. Thus, to truly thrive physically, emotionally, and spiritually, we need to change our pursuit of potential in the same way we need to change our pursuit of happiness. We need to stop trying to be faster alone, and start working to become stronger together.
p. 41 ...connecting with high-potential people dramatically increases your likelihood of high-potential outcomes. ...it turns out that not only do people around us powerfully shape the type of person we'll become, but that their influence begins to take root at a very young age. For example, they found that when three- or four-year-old children were surrounded by peers who were hard-working or social, they too would begin to work harder and be more social.
...Our finding, that personality traits are contagious among children, flies in the face of common assumptions that personality is ingrained and can't be changed.
p. 46 ...if animals don't care about a pecking order and they get along, that energy is transferred to production. In other words, when members of a group - be they human beings or chickens - focus only on competing their way to the top, they are likely to peck one another to death. They they work to lift one another up, however, everybody wins.
p. 51 A virtuous cycle (as opposed to a vicious cycle) is an upward spiral of potential whereby with each success, you garner more resources, which, in turn, allow you to achieve greater and greater successes.
p. 65 In basketball, for example, you would think that shooting percentage would best predict the outcome of a game, right? But in fact, a large BYU study found that the ratio of assists to turnovers is much more predictive of success. That's because lots of turnovers means players are hogging the ball so that they can score, whereas lots of assists means the players aren't trying to make individual shots; they are trying to get the collective win.
p. 117...praise is actually a renewable resource, Praise creates a Virtuous Cycle - the more you gibe, the more you enhance your own supply. When done right, praise primes the brain for higher performance, which means that the more we praise, the more success we create. And the more successes there are, the more there is to praise.
p. 119 By denying the light of praise, we extinguish it. By bending the light toward others, we magnify it.
p. 121 The easiest way to stop comparison praise is simply to eliminate superlatives from our vocabulary - "the best," "the fastest", "the smartest", "the prettiest". All of these undercut others instead of telling people they are great in their own right. Instead, follow what I consider an inviolable law of praise for leaders and parents: Do not compliment at the expense of others. ....the best praise is by actions changed.
p. 127...if we want to encourage excellence, we need a daily practice to shine attention on instances of excellence. The most powerful one in my life, and the one I suggest in every talk, is to take to minutes (maximum) each morning to simply write and send a text message or email praising or thanking someone in your life. Of all the positive habits I have, this is the most powerful one for multiple reasons. First, you have just scanned your relationships for something positive to spotlight, helping you see more positives, which, in turn, gives you more to spotlight. When I suggest this at companies, managers say that that simple email in the morning causes them to look for and see more things to praise and recognize on their teams the rest of the day.
p. 151 He had some strategies on defense against the dark arts of the world:
1. Build a moat (ie no social media or news in the first or last hour of the day.....not a new concept! I really should consciously do it! On p. 153 he said individuals who watched just three minutes of negative news in the morning were 27% more likely to report their day as unhappy six to eight hours later - it was like taking a poison pill each morning that made all of your efforts, energies, and interactions throughout the day more toxic)
2. Built a mental stronghold. This means to develop habits routines to remain calm, on task and hopeful in the face of immeasurable stress and sadness. (this was in reference to hospital teams who deal with big tragic events best)
3. Learn the art of Mental Aikido - look at stress positively. Accept it and work with it. Reframe failure as a learning opportunity.
4. Take a vacation from your problem - taking time away from your problems may actually help you reap one of the greatest competitive advantages that exist today....maintain a positive and engaged brain. Plan time away on a regular basis.
5. Pick your battles.
p. 182 How to channel collective energy
1. General more positive energy by creating Tours of Meaning (look for the beautiful in your every day life)
2. Use vivid direction to generate a path for that energy to flow
3. Accelerate the momentum you have created through the power of celebration. When you celebrate the good the negative seems to take care of itself.
p. 212 Realize that change is not a one time event. You will have to keep working on this for a lifetime!
You can't exercise today hoping to never need to exercise again. In truth, we exercise today so we can move our body again tomorrow. We must always be on guard and repairing what breaks down over time.
After we discussed what genre this story was, my students had many reasons why it was fantasy fiction. However, someone asked why some of the pictures were black and white and some were in color. We went back and looked at it. Suddenly one student brought up the idea that Kate might be imaginary because she told her parents about Kate and they said that she has such a good imagination. After that, we had a great discussion about their imaginary friends.
Goodreads says:
That adorable Emma Kate has an imaginary friend.They walk to school together every morning, and sit together in class.They sleep over at each other’s houses, and do their homework side by side.They even have their tonsils out and eat gallons of pink ice cream together. But a hilarious twist ending will have readers realizing there’s more to this imaginary friend than meets the eye!
Another of Polacco’s immensely popular younger books, Emma Kate is a wonderfully original story of pretend play and real friendship.
