Climate Change Handbook for Kids

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         For our final project, we decided to create a climate change activity book. The activity book includes important information about what is causing climate change, the environmental impacts, and ways individuals can work to reduce their carbon footprint. The book is aimed towards elementary and middle school children, but all children can engage with the activities. The goal of this project is to make scientific information about climate change easily understandable and accessible for children, but also positively framed. We chose to make an activity book for children because it is vital to have young generations involved and because there is little information and activities catered to children when discussing climate change. The activity book was designed to be distributed at Boyd Hill Nature Preserve within the education center, as well as the internet. After the completion of the activity book, 50 initial copies were printed out and displayed in the education center.

Positive framing was used as a method for communication throughout the book. When addressing climate change it is important to avoid negative framing because fear and guilt-inducing messages to influence attitudes often backfires, especially for children. “Communicators could see a huge lift in their message if their strategies are basically positive. Whatever we do should be inspiring, be engaging, and stimulate community” (Stoknes, 2015). We found it most effective to use positive opportunity framing for children. Positive opportunity framing avoids discussion of sacrifices, such as cutting out red meat or driving an SUV, and focuses on the benefits of sustainable practices. Examples of positive opportunity framing used within the handbook included living a healthier lifestyle and activities children can participate in with friends and family. We also used the power of stories throughout the handbook. We included an expert of a story to create meaningful engagement. The goal we had when writing a story was to describe and help children to imagine a renewal of society, wildlife, and ecosystems. It was important to include a story about positivity and a better way of life rather than explaining what we are failing to do for our planet because children react better to excitement. We also decided to include a variety of personal projects throughout the handbook to demonstrate that it can be easy, simple, and inexpensive to act green. The personal projects included a variety of recycling projects with materials found inside the home. The goal of the personal projects was to help provide ideas to children and their families as to how waste reduction can be met inside the home. The overall goal of this project was to help children better understand the implications of climate change, while preventing the symptoms of grief and guilt. 

The only difficulty we ran into was creating a message for children that was simple and easy to understand, yet properly addressing the issue at hand. While the information presented throughout the activity book seems simplistic, the issue of climate change is highly complex and not easily comprehensible for younger age groups. Overall, this project has inspired us to continue advocating for more use of sustainable resources and practices, as well as communicating with all age demographics about the issue of climate change. We feel as though this project has been successful because children and families that visited the nature preserve demonstrated active engagement with the material.











References 

Stoknes, P. E., & Randers, J. (2015). What We Think About When We Try Not To Think About
Global Warming: Toward a New Psychology of Climate Action (Illustrated ed.). Chelsea 

Green Publishing.

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