Nuts About Science

From IRA Children’s Book Award-winner, Michelle Houts, Lucy Saves Some Squirrels draws on STEM themes and is aligned with curriculum guidelines to bring a love of science to young readers, inspiring them to start their own labs and explore their world.

On Lucy’s first day of second grade, she’s excited to meet her new teacher, Miss Flippo, and find out everything’s she’s going to learn about this year in school. And when Miss Flippo tells the class that they’re going to have their very own science lab, complete with lab coats and goggles, Lucy can’t wait to start exploring.

But one thing is troubling her. The tree that sat outside her first-grade classroom all year is gone. Where are the squirrels going to live?

Inspired by her classroom lab, Lucy starts her own research mission to find out what happened to the tree, and then to lobby for the school to plant a new one. With the help of her cousin, Cora, and their new classmates, Lucy discovers that science is everywhere you look, and a lab can be anywhere you look.

Michelle Houts is the award-winning author of several middle-grade novels, picture books, and biographies for young readers including Winterfrost, which was a 2014 Bank Street Best Book and Junior Library Guild selection, and The Beef Princess of Practical County, which was awarded the 2010 IRA Children’s Book Award. She lives, works, and plays on a farm in western Ohio, where she is restoring a one-room schoolhouse. While in second grade, she begged her parents for a chemistry kit but wasn’t quite sure what to do when she actually got it. Lucy’s Lab allows her to be the scientist she always wanted to be.

Elizabeth Zechel is an illustrator and author of the children’s book Is There a Mouse in the Baby’s Room? Her illustrations appear in books such as Wordbirds by Liesl Schillinger , The Little General and the Giant Snowflake by Matthea Harvey, and cookbooks such as Bubby’s Homemade Pies by Jen Bervin and Ron Silver, as well as a variety of magazine and literary journals. She lives in Brooklyn, New York where she teaches Kindergarten.