Up Your Nose!

“I want to empha­size how inter­est­ing Melis­sa Stew­art has made her research and writ­ing process [in the book’s Note on Sources sec­tion]. Her notes show you her orig­i­nal inten­tion. She was going to focus on how humans and oth­er ani­mals smell, but then she real­ized she had to include the nose’s crit­i­cal role in breath­ing and tast­ing. Her books are col­lab­o­ra­tive as she col­lect­ed ideas from kids and even elicit­ed help from her nephew who want­ed to under­stand the dif­fer­ence between boogers and snot. Her books’ research took time as she writes “I had a hard time find­ing books with spe­cif­ic infor­ma­tion about the nose, so it took a long time to com­pile all the infor­ma­tion in this book.” She com­bines infor­ma­tion from a vari­ety of sources—books about res­pi­ra­tion but also descrip­tions of the nose from med­ical jour­nal arti­cles about plas­tic surgery. AND, she inter­views peo­ple like doc­tors and sci­en­tists for the most up-to-date infor­ma­tion. Be sure to share this page with your stu­dents before they begin research projects and writ­ing assign­ments. Stu­dents need to under­stand that even indi­vid­ual titles in a series are sep­a­rate works, not just fill-in-the blank tem­plates. This series illus­trates this beau­ti­ful­ly.” (School Library Jour­nal’s Prac­ti­cal­ly Par­adise blog)