Crafty Fun with Cheetah Dreams!

Today we celebrate Cheetah Dreams!!

Linda Stanek is a cat lover (follow her on twitter @LindaStanek to see her adorable kittens). So, when she began working on an academic book about cheetahs, her next children’s book was forming in the back of her mind. That book just came out last week and is a poetic love story to the majestic cats, but also has valuable facts. Readers are sure to show empathy with the cats as their habitat and numbers continue to decline. With equal passion, illustrator Shennen Bersani traveled to zoos and learned from keepers and the animals themselves. Her realistic illustrations show the fast cats in motion and at rest with adorable furry cubs.

Linda Stanek

Shennen Bersani

In the spirit of October, we have a fun craft to help you celebrate the release of Cheetah Dreams! You can illustrate this simple cheetah mask of your own. We used a paper plate, a combination of markers and paint, along with a folded pipe cleaner. You can be creative with the decoration and if you have a string or elastic to secure the mask that can simply be attached to the sides for a more secure fit.

 

Download the pattern and print it out.

Cut around the lines and then trace it onto a paper plate.

Cut the mask out of the paper plate along with the two ears.

Attach the ears either with staples or glue. And then color your cheetah face! Shennen’s beautiful illustrations are a great guide having been vetted for accuracy by some of the top Cheetah experts.

After painting your cheetah’s spots, attach the holding stick or elastic and be a cheetah for a day!

**This crafter is not as skilled as Shennen, so this cheetah mask has not been vetted by experts

Get you copy of Cheetah Dreams in English or Spanish from Arbordale or just learn more about the book on the book page!

It’s Hot! But Nature is Cool!

It’s no coincidence that we are sharing a book about summer on the Summer Solstice. That’s right, June 21 is the longest day of this year and therefore the day with the most sunlight. And what is the sun most known for? Keeping us warm, of course!

It keeps animals warm, too, which is a good thing when it’s cold outside. But what
happens when it’s hot? Animals can’t turn on the air conditioner or drink a cold glass of lemonade. A Cool Summer Tail explores how several animals adapt to hot temperatures. For instance, just like dogs, red foxes pant to dissipate their body heat because their skin doesn’t sweat like ours.

Did you know grey squirrels sometimes lick their forearms to cool off? This behavior has a similar cooling effect as sweating because when the saliva evaporates, their body heat is dissipated into the air.

Many birds stay cool by staying under the shade of tree leaves. This is one adaptation human animals can practice, too!

When the sun goes down at night, the temperature goes down, too. Some animals take advantage of the cooler air to find their food and move about. Imagine how our world would be different if humans slept during the day and were active only at night!

One way both humans and animals can stay cool is to take advantage of air blowing across our bodies. Whether it’s a lakeside breeze for a white tail deer or a circulating ceiling fan for humans, air helps dissipate body heat. While you are pondering this, make your own personal fan using the directions shared HERE by The Pinterested Parent.

Or make a paper plate mask of an animal featured in A Cool Summer Tail and encourage some pretend play. Directions HERE. While creating, discuss how animals adapt to summer heat and how these behaviors compare and contrast with how humans stay cool.

The next time you see an animal in its environment, take a minute to talk about how it adapts to the heat. Isn’t nature cool?

Carrie Pearson is the author of A Cool Summer Tail. The book is illustrated by Christina Wald. To investigate how animals stay warm when the temperature drops, check out another Arbordale book, A Warm Winter Tail, also written by Carrie and illustrated by Christina.

How Mountain Animals can chase off those Winter Blues

Thank you to author Kevin Kurtz for today’s blog post featuring a few mountain creatures and their ways to weather the winter! 

This winter, as you walk across the parking lot in your boots and winter jacket, be glad you are not a marmot. Like the other animals featured in my book A Day on the Mountain, marmots have to deal with a winter that may last from September until May. If you were a marmot, right now you would be in a state of hypothermia in a hole underneath a freezing rock, not really moving until you woke up some time in April.

Mountain animals must spend summer getting ready for the long winter. For marmots and black bears, this means getting as fat as they possibly can. They need to be fat in order to hibernate. Marmots pig out on grasses and flowers and black bears devour berries to build-up fat cells full of energy. When the mountain gets buried in snow, their bodies live off the energy in their fat until springtime.

Hummingbirds use a different strategy.  They spend the warmer months sipping nectar from the flowers that decorate mountain meadows. Then when the weather turns frosty, they do what pretty much every person over 70 in the northeast United States does: they head south for the winter. Instead of driving a minivan full of half their belongings down I-95, hummingbirds will fly their 0.2 ounce bodies hundreds, or even thousands, of miles to reach warmer climates during the winter.

One of the most amazing mountain winter survivors is the Clark’s nutcracker. During the summer, these relatives of jays and crows use their long beaks to pull seeds from pinecones. They eat some of them, but then fly around with the rest to bury tens of thousands of them all over the mountain. In the winter, they can remember the thousands of places they buried the seeds and dig them out from under the snow to get the food they need. I can’t even find the remote control in my living room half the time.

As extreme as our winters can seem, they do not match the winters animals on mountains must endure. Because the high elevation of mountains affects the temperature, these animals live in Arctic climates within temperate latitudes. So think of that the next time you are shoveling snow. At least you aren’t doing it to find pinecone seeds.

Do you want to learn more? Check out Kevin’s book A Day on the Mountain at Arbordalepublishing.com, then head to the coast with A Day on the Salt Marsh and into the sea with A Day in the Deep!