Gets Well, by Madeline Kaplan, the children depicted the Earth’ s well-being through art and storytelling. Using a variety of tools( watercolors, crayons, markers, collage materials, digital drawing apps), they created drawings of a healthy Earth and a sick Earth. The children also worked together to write the following story:
When you step on the flowers; when people chop down trees; when someone kills the animals; when smokes come from the car; when someone throws the garbage on the ground; when someone doesn’ t pick up the garbage, all those make Earth sick. When you grow plants; when someone cleans up the garbage; when someone helps butterflies and bees, make them safe; when someone is nice to each other; when someone doesn’ t step on the flower, all those make Earth healthy.
Art and storytelling activities can offer ways to help children represent complex ideas, including science concepts( Brooks 2009). They also provide additional avenues for expressing thoughts, even as children’ s writing skills are still emerging( e. g., Ripstein 2018). Planet Earth Gets Well served as a scaffold for the kindergartners’ thinking, providing metaphors and language that helped them make sense of climate change. The art and stories that they created further grounded their emerging understanding of climate change in concrete, observable ways.
Carbon Footprint
Climate literacy in early childhood should not be delayed for developmental reasons. Rather, like other aspects of an early childhood curriculum, key concepts should be anchored in the real-life contexts and experiences of the child: When new information and skills are embedded in children’ s relationships, emotions, and artistry, abstract ideas become both accessible and meaningful( e. g., NAEYC 2020; Aerila et al. 2024).
For example, before I introduced kindergartners to the idea of a carbon footprint, or the amount of greenhouse gases generated by one’ s actions( Nature Conservancy, n. d.), I considered how to make the concept meaningful to them. How could I help them differentiate between a literal footprint and a carbon footprint? How could I support them in linking human behaviors to environmental impacts in a relatable way?
I decided to use art and literacy activities, classroom discussions, and journaling. We began by reading the picture book Kids Get It: Shrinking Our Carbon Footprint, by Susan E. Gove. This book helped children understand how everyday choices— like recycling, conserving energy, and reducing waste— affect the Earth. We learned about humans’ impacts on the planet and introduced the idea of a carbon footprint during group discussions. Together, we looked at images of actual footprints and talked about how our actions leave marks on the Earth.
I then invited children to create ceramic art pieces to represent carbon footprints. They shared their thoughts in conversations and journaling, activities that gave them space to think and reflect and to engage in collaborative meaning making as they talked about their creations. These dialogic interactions allowed children to co-construct understanding of their learning( Carr 2011; also see“ Connection, Curiosity, and Care: An E-STEM Approach to Climate Change Education in Early Childhood” by Victoria Carr and colleagues in this issue).
As the kindergartners worked, I recorded their conversations and reflections. Comments included
›“ A carbon footprint is not your real footprint. It’ s what you did to the environment.”
›“ A carbon footprint is about your behaviors to people, plants. If your behaviors are mean to people and plants, your carbon footprint gets bigger. If your behaviors are good to people and plants, your carbon footprint gets smaller.”
›“ If you drive a car too much, or other vehicles, your carbon footprint gets bigger. If you ride a bike, a scooter, walk as you can, you make your carbon footprint get smaller.”
These statements showed that the children were beginning to grasp the idea of a carbon footprint by linking human behaviors to environmental impacts in ways that made sense to them. This understanding of cause and effect lays the groundwork for climate literacy( OECD 2024;
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