Apart, Together - A Book About Transformation
/
Educating for sustainability means inspiring children to think about the world, their relationship to it, and their ability to influence it in an entirely new way. Children learn the knowledge, skills, and mindsets to work towards their preferred future - a new paradigm for living with one another on Earth that celebrates our capability to thrive over time in the context of a rapidly changing and interdependent world.
Apart, Together - A Book About Transformation uses everyday scenes such as gardening, mixing color, playing a sport, and playing with blocks, to invite children and their grownups to read, discuss, play, imagine, and together, be curious about the connections that make up their world.
Having these types of conversations helps children build the muscle to see not only objects — a bee, soil, a soccer player— but to imagine how the interconnections and interactions among those objects can create something entirely new.
With each new page, critical thinking skills grow (such as observation, prediction, and sharing their ideas about how change happens) and the brain itself grows! And whether you’re 5 or 55, imagining how different parts interact to produce the results we see, is the first step in “systems thinking.” Developing early habits to imagine interconnections helps children feel more confident when dealing with complex problems as they grow.
Linda Booth Sweeney and I love to work together whenever we can. We are both passionate about the combination of systems thinking/system dynamics, Education for Sustainability, and teachers and students. Linda has a new book out entitled, APART, TOGETHER and asked us to review it.
My daughter Gracen is an elementary school librarian in New York City and I knew just what to do. Gracen agreed to do a read aloud of APART, TOGETHER to her Kindergarten class and created a graphic organizer for the students to record their learning from it. Before writing it down, one student exclaimed, “I’ve got it! People + Wood = Treehouse! Linda and I were thrilled to see that the Students got it: -this-interconnected with-that- = something entirely new!
See some of the other student work samples from the activity here:
Student Work
Collected by School Librarian Gracen Cloud at PS 10 in Brooklyn, NY
Teachers and Librarians!
Linda would love to see any of your activities or lesson plans using APART, TOGETHER or the CURIOUS ABOUT CONVERSATION questions. Please share any examples with Linda here: Linda@lindaboothsweeney.net. Linda will collect and share the ideas back to us through her website. You may even be able to convince her to do a free author visit! To stay in touch with her, SUBSCRIBE to her newsletter here.