Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian by Margarita Engle

     This piece of non-fiction text is a biography about Maria Merian and her scientific findings as a young girl. In a time period where insects were thought to be evil creatures born from the mud, Maria thought differently and studied the unique process of caterpillars becoming "summer birds", which we call butterflies. 

    This story gives a factual account of how Maria Merian was able to disprove a long believed theory that insects were evil and the result of a process that was called spontaneous generation. The illustrations throughout the book enhance the story, they give a bright and colorful depiction of the process Maria was observing, and how she would use her own art work to document her findings. The illustrations also give more insight to the time period that this was taking place. The clothing for example that can be seen in the art work makes it easier for students to understand that this was a long time ago, a time where everyone kind of just dressed the same! The style of writing is easy to understand, the language and information is not too complex for young learners too comprehend. The storyline is accurate to the events that happened, and are directly linked to the accomplishments of Maria (Galda et al., 2016). Students may really be able to connect with Maria in the book because she was just a kid herself when she was making all of these thoughtful discoveries! It is interesting and engaging, and provides opportunity to have thoughtful discussions with students. Maria dreamt of traveling the world, to paint all different sorts of insects, animals, and flowers. This story can show young learners that they are capable of being scientists right in there own backyard! 

    Motivational activities:

With this story, you could use it to correlate with a science lesson or unit on insects! It brings up the past assumptions and discoveries about butterflies, the whole process of what caterpillars eat, what happens when they are in a cocoon, and finally when they turn into a beautiful butterfly. Something that stuck with me since I was in first grade was when my class housed baby caterpillars right there in the classroom. We made observations daily, made sure they had food, and they were kept in a caterpillar safe container until they were ready to be moved into their bigger housing which is where they would eventually form their cocoons and become butterflies. Once they did this, we let them go free outside. Although this is a more involved activity to link with the book, it would be great for implementing important vocabulary related to the topic and for having students make their own observations and act like a scientist! I have seen this done since I was in first grade, and students always love it. You also could pair the book with other informational texts so that students can eventually create their own research on insects in their own community! 

Possible questions to ask:

1. What would be some words to describe Maria? 
2. Why do you think Maria went against what everyone else thought about insects?
3. Have you ever made a great discovery before?
4. Would you consider Maria a scientist? Why?

I enjoyed this read! I actually never heard about how back in time insects were thought of to be so bad and that they were considered evil. I found it very interesting and loved looking at the pictures. This is a great example of a biography to introduce to students because it is not too wordy or drawn out, and have a lot of great information about Maria Merian and her findings. I never heard about this story before I was researching different biographies that I could potentially use with students, and I think that it could be paired with plenty of other works of non-fiction to use during a unit on insects. It covers aspects of the history of insects, the life cycle, and introduces an important figure who happens to be a young child herself that researched and made scientific discoveries. 

References:

Galda, L., Liang, L. A., & Cullinan, B. E. (2016). Literature and the Child. Cengage Learning.

Engle, M., & Paschkis, J. (2010). Summer Birds: The Butterflies of Maria Merian (First ed.). Henry Holt and Co. (BYR).