Bardoe, C. (2006). Gregor Mendel: The friar who grew peas. New York, NY: Abrams Books for Young Readers.
Summary:
This is a picture book biography about the father of genetics, Gregor Mendel. It begins when he was young. The school that his town had was not challenging enough for him, so he went and lived at another school. His family could only afford to pay for tuition, books, and half of a meal plan, so Gregor only ate half of the time. While he was there, his father, who was a farmer, broke his back so Gregor took on tutoring jobs to cover tuition and books. He decided to become a friar to help feed him self. He did such a great job that as a reward he was sent to study at the University of Vienna, where he took a great interest in nature’s miracles. After returning for the University he taught science at a local school. While doing that, he yearned to answer the question “Why do mothers and fathers pass down their traits to their children?”. He wanted to find a pattern to answer this question using math. He began trying by using 34 types of peas. He bred each pair of peas to see how often each trait appeared. During an 8 year period, Gregor grew almost 28,000 pea plants and found out that every pea plant has two genes necessary to create any one trait.
Ages:
3rd through 8th grade
Credibility of Author:
Cheryl Bardoe is Senior Project Manager of Exhibitions at The Field Museum of Chicago. To write this book, she read many other books about Gregor Mendel.
National Standards that this book relates to:
Science in personal and social perspective, History and nature of science, and Life Science.
Access Features:
There is an author’s note and a selected bibliography.
Description of the Illustrations:
The Illustrations are paintings that look like watercolor and were created by Jos. A. Smith. The end pages have the same illustrations of vines that the title pages does.
Related Texts:
Pasachoff, N. (2006). Barbara McClintock: Genius of Genetics. Berkeley Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishing.
My response to the book:
This book explained the history of genetics in an easy to read format. It would be simple for students to read and understand the text with very few problems. I wish I had read this book before learning about traits in biology!
How I would use this book in my class:
This is a good resource when kids ask about why certain plants or people look the way they do. It would not be a very good read aloud for my younger students, but would be very useful in a high school biology class (everybody loves children’s books!).
This book is 38 pages.
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3 comments:
Do you think the "story" is written in an interesting enough way that some 3rd - 8th graders would be interested in reading about Mendel?
Oops-- I forgot--any awards?
This is another one of Brooke's books that I stole and read during a break on our last class! I was intrigued by it since I cover genetics in fifth grade science. I have a couple of activities that involves students breeding pea plants like Mendel did and determining what the offspring would look like. The kids loved it! They also loved going home and checking family members for dominant and recessive traits. This is a book I will purchase for my class!
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