Earth Week - Family Movie Night goes Green

Two nights ago the kids and I watched Dirt! The Movie together, and I loved the message. In all the known universe, only our planet has a living skin, called Dirt.

Kids love to play in the dirt, and my children were very interested in this portrayal of the aliveness of our dirt, the dangers to it, and what we can all do to love the dirt. The middle of the film, which portrayed strip mining and many other environmental problems, was a bit too intense and sad for the kids, but we stuck with it and the film-makers did bring it back to a positive message of change, so the kids were OK. It's such a fine line between too much scary destruction just leading to despair and too little attention paid to problems maintaining ignorance and the status quo.

Some other films we've watched as a family:

No Impact Man, but this one was a bit boring for my kids. It would be good for middle school and up, I think.

Planet Earth, of course.

The Blue Planet is a David Attenborough look at the watery parts of our planet.

Food, Inc. was a bit too much for the kids, again, but it was a hit with the youth group at church.

The Life of Birds - we love David Attenborough!

Life in the Undergrowth - David Attenborough again (but this one featured slug sex, which has to be one of the weirdest things we've ever watched as a family)

Earth Day Kids - Earth Appreciation in Art

I've been deep in reading to find the perfect readings for the Earth Day service I'm leading at church, and there are some wonderful nature poems and picture books out there.

The Tree That Time Built is a poetry compilation about nature and evolution, and includes an audiorecording with many of the poets reading their own poems. I love this one.

Art & Nature: An Illustrated Anthology of Nature Poetry pairs beautiful art with lovely poetry. I found several good readings in this one.

Anthology for the Earth draws from very diverse sources, including bits by John Muir and Thoreau and modern poetry, with illustrations of all types. Here you will find more strident calls for action.

The Curious Garden is a picture book that I will be adapting as the story for my Earth Day service.

Grandad's Prayers of the Earth was the lovely picture book that I adapted as the story for last year's Earth Day.


And there are many, many more out there! Read to your kids in honor of Mother Earth.

Earth Day Kids - Get 'Em Outside

Many years ago, I read the book Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature Deficit Disorder. It is a powerful argument for the importance of getting children out into nature, giving them an attachment to place, and letting them naturally develop a love of nature. This emphasis in ecological-education would make sure that kids love nature before they fear ecological destruction, avoiding what the author termed "ecophobia".

Unfortunately, in our modern life children may not have any contact with nature, not even with where their food comes from. And so the primary task of teaching children to be good earth stewards is just to get them outside in natural or even semi-natural settings.

Hence, resources such as the books I Love Dirt, and Let's Go Outside by Jennifer Ward, and the many bloggers participating in The Outdoor Hour Challenge and writing about their efforts to go outside for an hour a day.

I think the many Citizen Science projects out there are also excellent ways to get kids outside and engaged with nature. My family especially loved Project Feeder Watch, as a way to get through the winter while still engaged with nature.

And I'm not saying that you can't get your kids involved in environmental activism or service projects - but (especially for young kids) it's better to do something fun and positive than it is to emphasize problems. Going out and planting trees or cleaning a beach can be a wonderful experience for kids. Take them back to that spot later so they can enjoy their work, and bond with the place even further. There is a huge sense of pride in seeing "my tree" or "my trail" or "my beach" and that is a feeling of pride-in-place that leads to Stewardship.



Go Outside!

Count Down to Earth Day

April 22nd is Earth Day, and this will be the 40th anniversary of this holiday of environmental awareness. In honor of Earth Day, I'm going to post something about teaching children to appreciate the environment every day for the next week.

This isn't the most important thing to do, in my opinion (bigger ideas coming next), but one thing my family enjoys is playing environmental themed games, and Earthopoly is one of our favorites. Just like Monopoly, you move around the board and have a chance to buy properties, but here the properties are natural environments. You then collect carbon credits and can trade them for clean air.

There is also Oceanopoly, Garden-opoly, and Animal-opoly, but we haven't tried those.

Add a little environmental twist to your family game night - especially perfect for celebrating Earth Hour, I think (if you have natural beeswax candles to see by, of course).

Troubling History

Today we tackled some more difficult subjects in Sunday School, and we had a bit more talk and depiction of violence than usual.

Because today we talked about the crusades. The kids had heard of the crusades before, but they didn't know much about them. In the days of history textbooks controlled by the Texas Board of Education, the idea that Christians had committed atrocities in Jerusalem isn't getting a lot of classroom attention.

Our 4th-6th grade class has been doing a curriculum I wrote to accompany the PBS documentary, Jerusalem: Center of the World. The documentary is very well done, and the class consists of watching one chapter each week and then doing projects and discussion around the film. Today, the kids engaged in a very mature discussion of how the crusades were a violation of the faith and religion that inspired them. I love when kids can grapple with troubling issues, and they really did that so well today.

And then our 1st-3rd grade class was learning about Muhammad today, with a lesson I put together using the picture book by Demi. Completely without prompting, the kids launched from that book into a discussion of how much they "believed" in Muhammad, Moses, and Jesus. They were comparing the miracle stories and the messages, and they brought up ideas about how it could look like water had turned to blood, etc. The teacher explained what metaphor means, and I was just so proud of those kids!

It was one of those days, when I just felt like they got it, and everything worked.

My Mindful Mornings

It's been about 9 months now that I have had a morning yoga practice, and I wouldn't give it up for the world. I don't do it every single morning - weekends are off and obviously if I oversleep I have to skip it and some mornings are just so rough that I do a hot tub instead and call it "hot tub yoga".

But most mornings, I do at least 10 minutes of yoga first thing. I'm never going to be a pretzel - the same inflexible body that made it so hard to do ballet when I was younger just won't allow that - but that isn't why I do it.

The main reason I do it is because for those minutes out of my day, I check in with myself. I try to banish all other thoughts from my mind, and just pay attention to the way my body is feeling. It doesn't matter what I look like or how long I do it, it just matters that I give myself that time to just Be before the Do list and tasks of the day hit me.

So I stagger from bed and I am faced with some basic truths each morning:

there are inherent limits in our physical abilities and our physical selves

it's about balancing surrender to what is with effort toward what might be

you have to be honest with yourself - you can't fake this

it's natural for the mind to wander, and relaxing is actually a skill to practice

just Being is scary, and that feeling of boredom is a prod to avoid the discomfort of all of it


And, just to keep it real, here is my partner from this morning's yoga. She woke up at 5am, and fussed and fumed about having to stay in her room until 7am, when I got up. I invited her to join me for my yoga, and this was the result:

Sewing Books: Inspiration or Instruction?

If you read my post about doing three projects from Weekend Sewing, here is an update: I don't want to do anymore of those projects. I'm just going to give the book away, rather than force myself to do a project that doesn't appeal or won't be practical for us.

So - all of these books of sewing projects that are out right now are very appealing. But I don't actually do the projects out of them. Do you? I like to flip through them, and they inspire my creative juices to start flowing. But when it comes down to it, I usually either want a standard sewing pattern from an envelope or I just want to make it up as I go along.

Sometimes a project is inspired by a book, such as the sock creature Carbon made all by himself above, but that doesn't really justify buying the books, does it?