The Earth Book - Todd Parr

Cover of “The Earth Book” by Todd Parr

Summary:

Many of Todd Parr’s books ask the critical question, and this time is about “How are we going to save our planet?”. As Google Play Book mentions, this book includes lots of easy, smart ideas on how we can all work together to make the earth “feel” good - from planting a tree and using both sides of a piece of paper to saving energy and reusing old things in new ways. 

Raising awareness about climate change and what we can each do to help lessen its effects on our planet is critical. This is the foundation of your child learning about their action impacts on more significant social problems and starting the subject interest in various areas like policy-making and law.

Plus / discussion points:

While going through the list of ideas to participate, you can have these as discussion points.

• Ask your children these questions to practice critical thinking:

  • Among all of these, what do you think we are already doing well as a family?

  • Among all of these, what do you think we can improve on as a family?

• Ask your children these questions to practice proactive decision making and evaluation process:

  • What would you want to take on as your action item for this week? 

  • Should we make it an action item for longer than a week? What if we did this action for a month? 

  • When should we evaluate our action items? How? 

  • (And during the family meeting or evaluation day) Can you remind me what your action item was? How did we say we would evaluate this? How do you feel about your action item? Is there anything you would do differently? Do you think that action should have been given more time?

• On the very last page of this book, the book lists how we can help the earth. You can have a brainstorming session with your child to come up with other ideas that they can think of and put their ideas on post-it notes in the book or in a separate notebook.

• Additional tip: Sometimes, children engage much better when they do this as a group activity. So try to do this with their siblings or with a group of their friends.