I held 500 calories of uncooked rice in my cupped hands, which is more than many people around the world have to eat each day. I cut up an apple into 32 pieces, peeled a slice, and saw how small, comparatively, the farmable surface topsoil of the earth is. I tilted the "population clock" sand timer and realized how quickly (every ten seconds) 44 people are born on this Earth, and 17 die.
I did this, and a few dozen other hands-on experiments, because of this amazing book titled
EarthSearch, which includes spinners and coins and the bag of rice and things to lick and touch and fold.
I live in a state where only 58% of the high school students graduate on time and where the latest year-end state tests resulted in about 40% of all 8th grade students failing the science and math tests (the poor science results getting little press, by the way, because science proficiency isn't even a requirement for grade advancement). I live in a country obsessed with an educational act called
No Child Left Behind, which has resulted in teachers being forced to "teach to the test" (although many great teachers do try to transcend these limitations) and our children become nothing but regurgitators of facts and filler-outers of little bubbles on standardized test forms.
Thinkers? Innovators? Idea-champions?
Alas, no. Sure, there are those, but there are fewer every year, it seems.
And so, when I fell upon this book,
EarthSearch: A Kids Geography Museum in a Book, tucked away on a bookshelf upstairs for years now, I knew I had a perfect
FoodShed Planet Summer Reading Pick of the Week, for any age (not just children). It is fascinating, and brilliantly conceived. Put together by a team of educators, it starts with words like this:
"Our belief is that education is basically a do-it-yourself activity. You can't really learn something until you've held it, rattled it, smelled it, dropped it once or twice, and then, if it won't kill you, taken a bite out of it."
This book will help you do that, and perhaps inspire you, as it has me, to hold, rattle, smell, drop and take a bite out of yet more things on this planet we call Earth. Because if we, and our world's children, can't wrap our arms around the challenges of today and the future, we might as well just accept the fact that we have failed the test of humanity.
I held 500 calories of uncooked rice in my cupped hands, which is more than many people around the world have to eat each day. I cut up an apple into 32 pieces, peeled a slice, and saw how small, comparatively, the farmable surface topsoil of the earth is. I tilted the "population clock" sand timer and realized how quickly (every ten seconds) 44 people are born on this Earth, and 17 die.
I did this, and a few dozen other hands-on experiments, because of this amazing book titled EarthSearch, which includes spinners and coins and the bag of rice and things to lick and touch and fold.
I live in a state where only 58% of the high school students graduate on time and where the latest year-end state tests resulted in about 40% of all 8th grade students failing the science and math tests (the poor science results getting little press, by the way, because science proficiency isn't even a requirement for grade advancement). I live in a country obsessed with an educational act called No Child Left Behind, which has resulted in teachers being forced to "teach to the test" (although many great teachers do try to transcend these limitations) and our children become nothing but regurgitators of facts and filler-outers of little bubbles on standardized test forms.
Thinkers? Innovators? Idea-champions?
Alas, no. Sure, there are those, but there are fewer every year, it seems.
And so, when I fell upon this book, EarthSearch: A Kids Geography Museum in a Book, tucked away on a bookshelf upstairs for years now, I knew I had a perfect FoodShed Planet Summer Reading Pick of the Week, for any age (not just children). It is fascinating, and brilliantly conceived. Put together by a team of educators, it starts with words like this:
This book will help you do that, and perhaps inspire you, as it has me, to hold, rattle, smell, drop and take a bite out of yet more things on this planet we call Earth. Because if we, and our world's children, can't wrap our arms around the challenges of today and the future, we might as well just accept the fact that we have failed the test of humanity.