Earth Friend Forever, early elementary illustrated, with laughs and smarts

Funny, as in genuinely producing a laugh, is something that eco books don’t normally do, especially picture books aimed at kindergarten through third grade. However, Earth Friend Forever, manages to produce a laugh or two, in addition to driving home the eco point to those young audiences. It’s an illustrated book on our use of plastic that’s not too heavy, doesn’t speak down to young elementary students, and provides basic ideas on how they can help with the problem.

If anything, Earth Friend Forever is a simple primer, an introduction if you will, towards the way an anthropomorphic Earth would chat with a group of second graders. The pictures are big, colorful, friendly, and provide as much entertainment, as they do to encourage discussion about the use of plastic. This is a discussion at an eight-year-old level that presents the issue of how much plastic is used, how much is dumped but also acknowledges the many uses and helpful ways that plastic can help us.

It’s a smart book that makes kids curious, without making them feel too bad about being on the planet. Earth Friend Forever introduces itself as the host to all humans, acknowledges that we’ve been to the moon, and even says that the two celestial bodies have chatted about it. However, all healthy relationships have to chat once in a while and Earth needs to talk with us two-legged creatures about all of this plastic.

Eight million tons in the oceans, a dump truck of plastic put into it every hour, the fact that it never degrades, and its impact on animals on land and in the ocean are all touched upon. They’re done so in a way that’s appropriate for an illustrated book that will make those young readers think about the issue. It lets kids know that some things like banana peels and wood can be eaten by bacteria, but that plastic is a different kind of issue.

Earth Friend Forever lets those readers know that you can recycle or reuse some plastic items. It shows kids using canvas tote bags, metal straws (which I’ve never even seen), and doing beach clean-ups. The book’s version of the planet knows that we’re cool, smart people who will one day have a scientist who’ll discover a chemical way to break it down. It does all of this in a hopeful message that alerts kids to the issue and gives them an encouraging push to go solve it.

The final two pages are for older elementary school readers and provide a more detailed look at plastic, facts about it, and ways that scientists are currently trying to dispose of or avoid it. If you’re picking up some smart seeds from the book that’s because it’s authored by Molly Bloom, Marc Sanchez, and Sanden Totten, the folks behind American Public Media’s, Brains On!.  Brains On! is a podcast aimed at kids and talks about science in a way that treats the subject as the great curiosity vehicle it is, and kids as the question make that they are.

It’s a refreshing book that presents the problem, offers up hope that it can be solved and lets kids know that they can be included along for the journey. This is an engaging conversation, fun, and STEM-based knowledge trip that’ll motivate kids who just might be the ones to solve the plastic problem. The content will be too simple for those upper elementary school kids, but for those first and second graders who are just getting their eco groove on this is just the sort of compost that they’ll dig.

Earth Friend Forever is by Molly Bloom, Marc Sanchez, and Sanden Totten with illustrations by Mike Orodan and available on Little, Brown, and Company a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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