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The Green Literacy Handbook
Inspire Environmental Stewardship Through Critical Thinking, Reading, and Writing, Grades K–5
The Green Literacy Handbook blends environmental awareness with critical literacy, empowering educators to create lessons with thematic unit plans focusing on biodiversity, climate change, and systems thinking. Through hands-on implementation, students build better environmental responsibility and school community engagement.
Active learning that inspires critical thinking and environmental awareness
Introducing Green Literacy, a way of teaching that cultivates critical thinking, reading, and writing about environmentalism through children’s books and digital media. Students analyze multiple perspectives, engage in hands-on activities, and come to a deeper understanding of environmental issues. Supported through teaching models and thematic units, educators empower themselves and their students to develop environmental awareness toward sustainable change.
K–5 teachers can use this book to:
- Explore environmental justice issues using familiar stories and digital tools to spark curiosity and new ideas with reading, writing, and drama strategies for engagement
- Engage students with activities on weather, ecosystems, and how nature connects individuals and develops systems thinking
- Encourage students to see environmental issues from all angles to deepen their understanding and empathy and move them toward sustainable change
- Be empowered with seed ideas about environmental issues, including classroom engagement strategies and professional development opportunities
Related Topics
InstructionLiteracyStudent Engagement
Additional Information
“The Green Literacy model empowers students to be active participants in their learning through critical thinking, dialogue, and creation. The Green Literacy Handbook provides practical support for teachers to position students to connect literacy skills with nature and the environment in ways that are engaging, relevant, and accessible.”
“This book encourages young people to think critically and confidently about their relationship to the world around them. As a parent, I value this approach to preparing students to work through the environmental challenges they will inherit.”
“This handbook is an essential companion for educators in a variety of places and spaces that provides a flexible and helpful framework that honors educators’ unique journeys and sparks critical conversations for our students. It is a resource that empowers us to help cultivate a new generation of thoughtful storytellers and stewards for our planet.”
“The Green Literacy Handbook deserves to be in the hands of teachers everywhere, including teachers in urban schools and those who do not think of themselves as especially ‘green.’ Overflowing with pedagogical insights, transformative activities, excellent reading recommendations, horizon-expanding questions, and much more, the handbook maps out student-centered approaches that promise not only to turn K–5 classrooms into laboratories of environmental-justice thinking but to prepare young learners for lives of meaningful environmental action. This is a book that our educational system has needed, badly, for many years.”
