THE ENVIRONMENT

A green guide to different crafts, activities, and stories about the environment.

Follow a series of simply rendered cartoon characters as they direct readers to a potpourri of different activities and stories focused on environmental protection. The characters appear in two skin tones, pale and brown, all with freckles and distractingly contrasting noses. The pages are lush, colorful, and slick, but the content may leave readers scratching their heads: Who is the intended audience for this book? The in-book activities are both verbose and very simple to complete. The crafts are fairly solid choices, but they range from simple stamp painting and creating milk-carton bird feeders to developing small windmills and solar ovens. (A couple of necessary templates are supplied in the backmatter.) Their directions also vary in exactness, sometimes relying on readers to infer steps. The vocabulary and sentence structures outpace many of the crafts, but the information peppered throughout is straightforward. Each section is more a collection of trivia than anything else, however; it’s too brief to aid in creation of science-fair projects and doesn’t provide suggested sources for additional reading. (This book was reviewed digitally with 9.4-by-14.6-inch double-page spreads viewed at actual size.)

Reads like an early educator’s Pinterest search history for Earth Day.