Rez Dogs

Rez Dogs
by Joseph Bruchac (Author)
@ Amazon | Bookshop | IndieBound

Booktalk: Malian loves spending time with her grandparents at their home on a Wabanaki reservation. She’s there for a visit when, suddenly, all travel shuts down. There’s a new virus making people sick, and Malian will have to stay with her grandparents for the duration.

Everyone is worried about the pandemic, but Malian knows how to keep her family and community safe: She protects her grandparents, and they protect her. She doesn’t go outside to play with friends, she helps her grandparents use video chat, and she listens to and learns from their stories. And when Malsum, one of the dogs living on the rez, shows up at their door, Malian’s family knows that he’ll protect them too.

Snippet:
Grampa Roy smiled.
“Yup, our rez dogs
are not like them
you see in the cities.
You’ll never see
our good friend here
being walked around
on some fancy leash.


A 2021 Cybils Poetry nominee

Copyright © 2021 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved.

It Takes Guts: How Your Body Turns Food Into Fuel (and Poop)

It Takes Guts: How Your Body Turns Food Into Fuel (and Poop)
by Dr. Jennifer Gardy (Author) and Belle Wuthrich (Illustrator)
@ Amazon | Bookshop | IndieBound

Booktalk: A science-based resource for classroom learning and home-schooling for kids age 9 to 13, with information about:

  • The surprising role that food and digestion play in your mood and immune system.
  • The amazing tools your body uses to break down food including acids, which do their thing without burning a hole in your stomach!
  • The incredible truth that not all bacteria is bad! Billions of “helpful bacteria” belong in your gut.
  • And so much more.

Snippet: Microbes can even influence our mood! We’ve already seen how our gut talks to our brain through nerves and hormones, and it turns out that these conversations can be influenced by our resident microbes. In one study, researchers gave one group of healthy volunteers milk or yogurt enriched with friendly Bifidobacterium and Lactobacillus bacteria every day for 30 days. The other group was given a placebo–a pill that did nothing. At the end of the month, the group that took the bacterial pill reported fewer bad moods and stressful moments, and they were producing less cortisol–a hormone produced when you’re under stress–than they were at the start of the experiment.

It’s STEM Friday! (STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics)

Copyright © 2021 Anastasia Suen All Rights Reserved.