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Follow the Moon Home: A Tale of One Idea, Twenty Kids, and a Hundred Sea Turtles, by Philippe Cousteau, Deborah Hopkinson, and Meilo So, and Amara and the Bats, by Emma Reynolds, are very similar stories. But the differences are enough that while kids might notice the similarities (mine did) they can also enjoy both books (ditto).
In Follow the Moon Home, Vivienne moves to a new town on the beach and discovers that baby sea turtles are hatching and, confused by the lights of the town and beach houses, going away from the water and dying. She proposes a class project to save the turtles by getting people to turn off lights during hatching season. The kids organize and fundraise and educate people, and they succeed.
In Amara and the Bats, Amara has loved bats since she was little, but when she moves to a new place, she can’t find any bats. A park ranger tells her that there used to be bats there, but their habitat has been reduced and they’ve disappeared. Amara organizes to restore bat habitat and protect parkland, and eventually, the bats come back.
What’s critical about both these books is that Vivienne and Amara organize. Having identified a problem, they reach out in their communities and get people to take collective action. They may not be trying to spur global action on climate change like Greta Thunberg is, but the books offer a manageable, age-appropriate theory of change for kids, and a set of tools for achieving something.
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