In celebration of Blog Action Day, which is focusing on climate change this year, and to support Reduce Footprints ‘Change the world Wednesday’ challenge (which is to take part in Blog Action Day!) I want to share a positive children’s book with you.
I’ve got a bit of a thing at the moment about children’s books. As a young child I was able to find plenty of books to nourish both mine and Little Miss green’s soul.
We spent hours looking at books together, telling stories and hearing the same story being read and re-read.
Once she learned to read herself things changed. Little miss Green’s favourite indoor past time is undoubtedly reading. We go to the library once a week where she takes out the maximum number of books allowed and she gets through them all.
She complains that she has read every book in our local library; and I’m quite sure she has!
The other week she asked me to start reading her again at night time. I scoured through her shelves and my heart sank. There were messages about being a sassy ‘gimme’ kid, ones about being too fat, too ugly, about being bullied, being naughty, running away, parents splitting up … It went on and on and I didn’t find anything to be joyful about.
Hope is a little girl who makes a Birthday wish to meet an alien. She receives a telescope for her Birthday and gazes up at Mars.
Meanwhile on Mars, Martin Love is using his Dad’s telescope to look at planet earth and his Dad tells him that Mars was once a planet with enough food and water for everyone; but the martians got greedy, wasted the water, abused their planet and ended up killing virtually all life. Does that ring any bells?
Martin Love is concerned about the state of planet earth (he can see through his telescope that the polar caps are melting) and he believes he can do something about it.
It’s an uplifting and positive story about the power of faith and the human ability to adapt and change for positive benefit. It’s about making changes one small step at a time and gathering together community spirit to bring about that change.
It’s so refreshing to find a children’s book for older children which carries a positive and meaningful message. If you have any other suggestions for us, I would be grateful! We had loads of lovely books when Little Miss Green was younger, but I’m struggling to find much for children of her age and if anyone mentions Jacqueline Wilson, it will release a string of very un-Buddhist like language and thoughts from me.
Fortunately, Hope and the Super Green Highway is due to be released soon; so we have something for a little while longer!
Our daughter disappeared sometime ago with Cornelia Funke’s ‘Inkheart’ Trilogy. We’re not sure when she’s going to return so I guess it’s absorbing stuff. I’ve not read it myself yet so I don’t know if it has a positive earth message, though I think the gist is about the power of words and story telling, it’s great you chose to talk about books on Blog Action Day, we can be the authors of our future.
@Goo: Hi Goo, thanks for this – I’ll look into the series – the power of words and story telling is a powerful message; thanks!