My new children’s chapter book, Swimming with Sharks, is now available as a Kindle Ebook. This book is written for young readers, from 5-to 9-years-old, as a beginning chapter book. You can download a copy today and begin reading it with your kids tonight. Click on the book title link and it will take you to the page on Amazon.
Swimming with Sharks features two young girls living on the Outer Banks of North Carolina with their parents who work at a marine science center. The girls love the ocean and are learning about its creatures. The story opens with the girls snorkeling in the ocean while their parents dive below them conducting research. Back at the aquarium, they overhear students talking about sharks and spreading their own misunderstanding. After a confrontation with the other students, the girls help their parents nurse a sick sandtiger shark back to health. The story is fun and entertaining, but is also loaded with information about sharks and why they are something to be respected and admired, but not feared.
As my own girls were growing up, they were huge fans of the Magic Treehouse books that included information on science, art, history and geography while being carefully disguised as a fun adventure. I decided to write stories for them focusing on the ocean. Swimming with Sharks is the same approximate length as the Magic Treehouse books and other beginning chapter books. There are eight chapters, each about 1000 words long.
Swimming with Sharks is the second book to follow Jayne and Marie on the Outer Banks. The first was called “The Sea Turtle Rescue” and was originally published by the international environmental organization Oceana and used as part of their sea turtle outreach program. The Sea Turtle Rescue is now available for newspapers to publish as part of the Newspapers in Education program. Contact your local newspaper and tell them you want to see The Sea Turtle Rescue in your local newspaper.
One topic in the Swimming with Sharks is a thing called “finning” where sharks are caught, have their fins cut off for soup and then the animal is thrown back into the water to drown. If you want to learn more about this barbaric practice, I wrote a blog about it a few weeks ago.
Sharks are amazing creatures to see in the water and I am lucky to have made dives with sharks several times. I hope we learn that sharks are important to the health of the oceans before we are too late. A great way to do that is teach our children so they understand..
