PaleoJoe Discusses Dinosaurs and Reading
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Announcer: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education, a weekly show featuring interviews with community leaders, school administrators, school business officials, and individuals, who are passionate about the future of Michigan education. And now, here is your host for Inside Michigan Education, Rob Huisingh.
Rob Huisingh: Welcome to Inside Michigan Education. This week we are joined in the Foxbright Podcast Studio by PaleoJoe. PaleoJoe is the name of the fictional character in a series of children's books called 'PaleoJoe's Dinosaur Detective Club'. The author of this series and the real life inspiration behind the character is the paleontologist Joe Kchodl. Welcome Joe; it's great to have you on our show again.
Joseph Kchodl: It's wonderful to be back again.
Rob Huisingh: Hey Joe, March is reading month, so we thought it'd be interesting to have you back in and talk to us about your thoughts as we approach this time of reflection and attention on reading. Tell us how did you get started, writing?
Joseph Kchodl: Well that's a great question. I wanted to be involved in writing ever since I was a kid; actually it's one of my dreams that I actually did accomplish. I had wanted to write a book on trilobites, because that is my first love. I love those little creatures that crawl on the ocean floor. So I actually self-published a book on trilobites and had pretty good success with that. But I have been doing school programs now and library programs in Michigan since 1993 all over the state. And a publisher heard about me and he asked me to write a children's book. It was a book called 'Hidden Dinosaurs', and it's one of their series of Hidden books; they have got 'Hidden Michigan' and 'Hidden Cherries'.
I wrote that book; it was for kids grades 2 and under, and it's really a nice book. You get a nice rhyming story about dinosaurs and then there is a little legend at the bottom that has little dinosaur pictures in it and those pictures are hidden in the rest of the pages. I did that for him, and he said, "You know, this is so good! Why don't you do some chapter books?" It was a natural from there.
We decided to do a 12-book series on dinosaur mysteries and adventures, and because of my name PaleoJoe, we decided to call it 'PaleoJoe's Dinosaur Detective Club'.
Rob Huisingh: Now that's great. Now, I understand you use a journal; you keep a journal when you are out in the field and you keep that for ideas in your books. I also understand that children use journals in school. They might be surprised to find that you actually use them in real life.
Joseph Kchodl: Absolutely, and I do schools all the time and as a matter of fact, today I just finished a couple of schools, and it's one of the things that I talk about. I say, "How many of you write a journal or a diary?" And they raise their hands. I say, "Some schools call them Writer's Notebooks; some schools call them Journals. Whatever you call it; I want you to keep doing it, because that's what I do when I go to the field." And they are kind of, they are eyes open up. I say, "I might be digging a dinosaur on the side of a hill and I slip and fall and roll down the hill and splash into a river. I think that's cool; I write that down in my journal and some day that might end up in one of my books." And the smile of the kids' faces, they get it; they understand. So, I really stress journal writing to them, because I do take a journal with me. It's my field guide, my field notebook.
What I find, when I find it, all the different things surrounding my find are put in that journal, and from that journal some of my books arise.
Rob Huisingh: Now, I hope you don't mind me saying this, but when you come to a school, it's a pretty big deal.
Joseph Kchodl: It's yeah.
Rob Huisingh: It's one of the few times that a library is standing room only, and lines around the walkway and sometimes out in to the block. They are pretty well attended. What do you attribute this success and what, if anything, can you say to teachers who are looking to try to instill -- to get children interested in a lifelong reading process?
Joseph Kchodl: It's sometimes difficult. Let me try. Shut me down if I go too long. It's interesting because, first of all, everybody loves dinosaurs. I mean adults, children, kids of all ages love dinosaurs. It's, kind of, our imagination runs wild when we see these skeletons, what could these creatures have been. They were here millions of years ago and they are gone. What happened? So it's quite an easy fit to get kids excited about dinosaurs.
What teachers can sometimes do is they can use dinosaurs in their education themselves. When we talk about millions of years, well, in math class, you can start adding and subtracting and coming up with millions. How much is a million? If you had a million pennies, how much would that be, you know, spatial-wise and also monetarily, how much is it? All those kinds of things are things that teachers can do to excite the children.
I do that every time I go into a school, and you are right there just standing in some places; I go to libraries, I did a library up in the U.P., where the people were standing outside the facility with all the windows open, because they wanted to hear.
Again, to excite the kids about dinosaurs is not hard, to excite them about reading is a little bit more difficult, and that's what these books, kind of, do. They are like the Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys for dinosaurs, and once they get involved in a mystery, they become part of that mystery, and they are trying to learn and solve this crime; this thing that has happened, this dinosaur that has disappeared or this fake that has arisen from somewhere, and the kids get a chance to actually join me and try to solve this mystery.
Rob Huisingh: So, I understand you have a new book.
Joseph Kchodl: Yes, I have a new book, it's called 'Mysterious Mammoth', and I try as hard as I can to look globally. In 'Mysterious Mammoth', we actually go to Siberia, and we talk about the Dolgan people, the people that have the reindeer herds and they have this big sled, and their house is built on this sled, and they travel around Siberia in this sled house, and we talk about that in book number six, it's coming out next year. It's called Sinister Psynoniphosaurus that's a tough one to say. We go along the Trans-Siberian Railroad into China.
So we do a lot of geographical stuff as well; we have got a lot of geography, different languages. I try to make it as well rounded as possible; again, to keep kids excited, and keep them reading. Let me relay the story to you that actually happened. I have a co-author Wendy Caszatt-Allen. She is from Michigan; she is now a school teacher out in Kalona, Iowa. She had a student in her class that really hated to read, he just couldn't stand reading, just hated it. So what she did is she put 'The Disappearance of Dinosaur Sue' book on the corner of her desk and kinda left, they had a free period and she was, kind of, wondering around.
After a while he came up to the desk and he picked up the book, and he went back to his chair and opened it up and was, kind of, leafing through it. After a while she saw his lips were moving just a little bit. At the end of the period he closed up the book, came back upfront and laid it on the corner of the desk, and said, "Good book." So again, it's one of those things, you capture somebody's interest like that and they are going to start reading. It was a very nice story; I was very happy about that.
Rob Huisingh: Now last year when you were here, well it was about a year ago, you were talking about the ultimate field trip, where you were going to take a whole class out on a dinosaur dig in Wyoming. So which class won?
Joseph Kchodl: We had a school down in the Wayland, Michigan, right down here in this area, it was Pine Street Elementary and Mrs. Janet Johnson's class, they won the trip. Very exciting! We came in to their classroom and kind of -- it was, kind of, a misdirection. A whole bunch of people came in cameras, but the Principal came in ahead of time and said, well, we are going to do some interviews about the budget and all of these things coming up.
So, the kids really didn't pay much attention, everyone was kind of cool. And all of a sudden, I turned the corner and walked into the classroom, and the entire classroom erupted. They knew exactly what happened.
So we said, I walked in and I said, "Guess what? You have won the Ultimate..." and as soon as I said ultimate, that was it. They didn't hear anything else I had said, because the screaming was just so loud. People in the school that were several hallways away, came running down to see what happened because it was that loud. The kids had a great time.
Rob Huisingh: So what did they do?
Joseph Kchodl: Well, we actually took a bus trip. We went all the way to a place called Thermopolis, Wyoming by bus, and we passed through a lot of states. We saw some wonderful scenery. Some of these children had never been outside of Wayland, Michigan. Many of them had never been outside of Michigan, period.
So we took a bus trip. We went across Nebraska, they saw the wonderful plains in Nebraska. They saw the cornfields as we drove through. We got up in to the mountains of Wyoming. They had never seen mountains before. We were coming up to this wonderful valley with this huge raging torrent of a river to the left of us going up the valley. People down there fly-fishing; it was just absolutely magnificent, and we drove right up in to Thermopolis, Wyoming.
We actually had a chance to dig dinosaurs. The students had several stations that they actually participated in. One station was actually digging for dinosaurs. They got a chance to actually see what dinosaur bones look like in the ground.
Another station was we went back to laboratory and the kids actually got a chance to clean the dinosaur bones using the same tools that paleontologist use.
Another one of the stations was they actually got a chance to make a cast, which is what we do when do paleontology, we don't put the bones on display anymore. That's very destructive to the bones. We want to save them, preserve them for scientific study. So we make models out of those, and the kids got a chance to do molding and casting. So they did everything that a paleontologist does, right on the ground, digging dinosaurs, and in the laboratory. It was spectacular.
Rob Huisingh: Well I want to thank you so much for coming in and talking to us, and appreciate you spending the time.
Joseph Kchodl: My pleasure.
Rob Huisingh: I hope you keep up the good work and continue to visit with those students.
Joseph Kchodl: We definitely will try. Thank you very much.
Rob Huisingh: If you would like to contact PaleoJoe, he can be reached by telephone at (989) 430-3980. Again, that's (989) 430-3980. You can also visit his website online. It's www.paleojoe.com. Again, that URL is www.paleojoe.com. His books are published by Mackinac Island Press, and for more information on Mackinac Island Press; it is available at www.mackinacislandpress.com.
If you have a story about something interesting and it concerns Michigan education, well, if you do, we invite you to send us your thoughts. You can find us online at www.insidemieducation.com. Until next week, this is Rob Huisingh with Inside Michigan Education.
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