Reviewed by Suzanne Flynn
Gr. 4, College Adjunct Teacher, JASON Academy Instructor
More and more information is being shared with us about global warming and climate change. With all of the television, internet, and newspaper articles popping up on these topics, what can we believe? Is there any evidence of this change over time taking place in your neighborhood?
This book introduces the methods through which the scientific community has documented climate change and the responsibilities of citizen scientists as we move to remediate the problem. As you read this timely book, How We Know What We Know About Our Changing Climate: Scientists and Kids Explore Global Warming, you’ll find out how some students, teachers, and scientists have become active in collecting data. Many of the examples can be applied in local communities.
Students young and old have become part of the studies in the USA, Mexico, and Siberia. For example, if you have butterflies or birds in your area, perhaps you could start keeping track of such activities as their arrival and departure dates. Or you may be interested in noting plant life changes as the weather warms in spring and summer or cools in fall and winter. Recording ways that plants or animals adapt or change their growth and location are important now and will be in the future as certain trends are examined by students and scientists.
There are even historical connections in this book. Readers will learn, for instance, that by keeping records at his Monticello home, Thomas Jefferson was one of the original phenologists who studied how nature changes with the seasons. You can be a phenologist, too, and ask why changes are occurring. Living things seem to be responding to change in climate where the air temperature affects the lives of animals and plants.
By reading and discussing this book, readers can easily relate to the most current information that is carefully researched and presented in two-page spreads. There are many outstanding full-color photographs of students and scientists actively participating in observation as well as data collection. By using computers, their data can be analyzed, graphs can be created, and hypotheses can be explored. Amateur naturalists around the world are documenting climate change. Some records go back 250 years and are indicating broader patterns of change.
Using maps and data collected, citizen scientist students can explore the work of many leading scientists as they investigate why the numbers of frogs, polar bears, or penguins are decreasing as their special habitats are effected by rising temperatures. Scientists have even been able to reconstruct a 9,000 year timeline of climate records with bristlecone pine tree data.
As you read this amazing book, you will find new vocabulary words defined in context; reading and comprehension go hand in hand. Students and teachers can participate in brainstorming, experiments, water monitoring, or class discussions that might lead to student activism to improve our environment. With others around the world who are working on their hypotheses, we explore how life forms are changing due to increases in temperatures. From these efforts, there is a growing realization by students and adults that what we do here in North America impacts life in other places in our world.
By presenting real-life accounts of scientists and their work, author Lynne Cherry helps students and others connect with our environmental problems and actions by becoming active decision makers. Hopefully the interconnections of all living things with their surroundings will lead us to see the Earth as one living system in the past, present and future.
Cherry distinguishes between a climate footprint and a carbon footprint,and presents ways that students can get involved in saving planet Earth. The "Resources" section provides many more ideas about programs that students can join as active participants. This engaging book is a "must read" for students, teachers, parents, and their community at large. A separate teacher's guide is correlated with standards for grades 5 to 8.
Review posted on 3/6/2008
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