ANA AND THE SEA STAR: STEM Game
Best Users: STEM Educators, Classroom Teachers, Librarians, Booksellers, Nature Centers, Home Learners
Best Audience: Children Grades 00-02
EXPLORE & DOWNLOAD THE ACTIVITY
To mirror young Ana’s environmental stewardship and to explore the locomotion of all the sea creatures in the book Ana and the Sea Star (Tilbury House Publishers), we created this STEM game with public librarian and environmental educator Jennifer Beach.
The players start on the beach (laid out with beige yarn or tape upon the event floor) where sea stars have washed ashore (cut-out paper sea stars on the floor). Taking up one sea star each, players will make a wish for the ocean or her creatures upon the sea star.
By selection of the game spinner (template provided), players will move like the animal selected across the beach, into the water (laid out with blue yarn or tape upon the event floor), and finally end at the kelp bed (laid out with green yarn or tape upon the event floor). There, players will release their sea stars. Play! STEM! Art! Environmental Stewardship!
DOWNLOAD Ana and the Sea Star: Ocean Locomotion Game (PDF)
Our thanks to consulting librarian Jennifer H. Beach. Jennifer is a Certified Professional Environmental Educator and the Children’s Programmer at Kenton County Public Library in Erlanger, KY. Jennifer is also a contributing editor at STAR_net where she writes about library programming.
Photos by the marvelous Libby Verdalli.
ABOUT THE BOOK
Ana and the Sea Star
By R. Lynne Roelfs
Illustrated by Jamie Hogan
Published by Tilbury House Publishers
ISBN-13 9780884485223
Age Range: 4-6 Years
A young girl finds a living sea star on the beach and wants to take it home. Her father explains that the creature needs the sea to survive. With a newfound sense of stewardship and a mermaid-inspired imagination, Ana is able to let the sea star go and yet keep it with her at the same time. Back matter invites children into the lives and experiences of a jellyfish, stingray, loggerhead turtle and other sea creatures.
“Hogan’s painterly and realistic illustrations take viewers to the beach and under the sea. Her depictions of the natural world evoke the joy of the sea, the salty air, the sand, and the animals that live in this habitat. Hogan’s experience as an island dweller in Maine truly shines. Roelfs’s text has a lot going on. It covers respecting the natural world, animals of the sea, and using one’s imagination through much description and dialogue. The illustrations work well at grounding and depicting the abundant text. There is back matter that provides further description and facts about the animals mentioned in the story, including Ana. VERDICT This gentle story and lovely artwork touch on sea animals, using one’s imagination, and respecting nature. An informative and delightful addition.”
—School Library Journal
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“Hogan has in the view of this writer entered the sacred pantheon of books worthy of Caldecott attention with the quietly powerful and sensory Ana and the Sea Star. That Roelfs’s life-affirming story, told with poetic grace was the springboard makes the completed work all that more distinguished…There is an acute literary kinship between McCloskey’s unforgettable sensory immersion and Ana and the Sea Star, a work that similarly places youthful wishes front and center during the most formative years.Young readers are treated to an illustrated glossary featuring the sea creatures encountered in the text along with a four or five sentence engaging description of each. Making the connection of human to animal life is a similar showcasing of Ana, defined as a homo sapien, a vertebrate like some of the others, but most notably the youngest species of them all and one with the unique power of imagination.”
—Sam Julian, Wonders in the Dark
