Vision

We’ve realized that climate change is often wrongfully portrayed as an unsolvable issue, and children can easily feel overwhelmed. Because of this, parents and teachers tend to get younger children acting without them truly understanding the goal they’re working towards. Although our community may be doing their part, understanding the issue is truly the only way to keep children engaged in doing what they can.

We were inspired to take on this issue after meeting with the Atlantic Coastal Action Program (ACAP) about collaborative efforts we could make to engage our student population on issues relating to climate change. As a climate action group, we have been active and recognized in our school since its founding in 2018. We knew that this year we wanted to pursue more community outreach initiatives, specifically at the elementary level. The question that arose out of our meeting with ACAP was, “how can we talk about climate change and climate action with elementary-aged students in a way that is empowering rather than instilling fear or dread?” Seeing that our group is supervised by two English teachers and run by two students who have always been passionate about literature, we soon concluded that writing a children’s book would be the perfect avenue to pursue this question!

We believe that the message in our book, and our Climate Action Project as a whole, is important to our community because youth are at the heart of building a sustainable future for our planet. We want to empower younger members of our community to recognize that they can make small changes to keep our planet healthy.

Action

For our Action project, we wrote a children’s book on climate change mitigation titled “Keeping it Cool.” The story uses analogies to explain the effects of global warming while also providing age-appropriate solutions for this global issue. After providing examples of things that release carbon dioxide, the main character takes us on a climate-cooling adventure that gives students the confidence to take climate action into their own hands. Our text is an effective resource for teachers and parents alike to generate educational conversations about climate change in a way that is accessible and positive for young students. Now that our book is written and we have printed advanced reading copies, we have begun visiting elementary school classrooms to spread awareness that, regardless of age, anybody can help make a positive impact on our climate! This is the first step in the distribution of our book.

Reflection & Celebration

To celebrate Earth Day, on April 21st, we visited a local elementary school to share our story. We were able to read our story and facilitate discussion about the text with every K-5 class at the school. In addition, we developed educational programming that links reflect with climate mitigation actions discussed, such as keeping areas free of waste (outdoor clean up and nature walk) and planting flowers to capture carbon dioxide. Educating students has always been the intention when writing this book. Having the opportunity to present to ten different groups helped us gain insight on how to better our presentation and content, as well as see the impact this book will have on students. Throughout the month of June, we will be visiting four-to-five elementary schools to read our book and continue to raise awareness about how youth can help mitigate climate change. We will continue to visit elementary schools into the fall of 2023 to continue distributing the first printings of Keeping it Cool, which this grant has graciously funded.

On May 23rd, 2023, we visited Dr. Grant Williams’ Climate Education class at St. Thomas University (School of Education) to inspire pre-service teachers about creating a Climate Action group at their future schools. During this event, we had the opportunity to share our book with teacher candidates and facilitate discussion about how to create content that is student-friendly while also academically rigorous. Throughout our reading of the book, we demonstrated where teachers could pause their reading to generate conversations about climate change. We also shared insight into the research and writing process with teacher candidates and shared questions that elementary students asked on April 21st and how we responded to them. The feedback from Dr. Grant Williams and his students was incredible. Teacher candidates were engaged, some were even moved to tears, and others inquired about when they could purchase the book for their future classrooms.

Following our two-hour session with the St. Thomas School of Education, we meet with the Gaia project to discuss future goals for our book. The Gaia project provided feedback on the content of our text and insight into the publishing process. We hope to continue to collaborate with the Gaia project to grow this project. It is our goal to get our text Keeping it Cool into the Gaia project’s K-5 sustainable literacy packet once we achieve publication.

As mentioned, we hope to continue to grow this project and have the opportunity to publish our book professionally to be distributed throughout the province to all elementary students.

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