Climate Change
This illustrated picture book introduces young children to climate change. It explains climate as the usual weather in a place over a long time, contrasts it with daily weather, and shows how natural forces shaped past climates. It then describes how burning coal, oil, and gas releases heat-trapping gases, how scientists track changes using ice, tree rings, and space images, and how shifting weather affects people, farms, and wildlife. The book closes with hopeful everyday actions—using less energy, walking, biking, planting trees, and protecting wild places.
About the Book
This illustrated picture book introduces young children to climate change. It explains climate as the usual weather in a place over a long time, contrasts it with daily weather, and shows how natural forces shaped past climates. It then describes how burning coal, oil, and gas releases heat-trapping gases, how scientists track changes using ice, tree rings, and space images, and how shifting weather affects people, farms, and wildlife. The book closes with hopeful everyday actions—using less energy, walking, biking, planting trees, and protecting wild places.
Prerequisite Requirements
No formal preparation is needed. It helps if a child has noticed daily weather, seasons, or familiar energy use such as lights, cars, or heat, and if a grown-up is ready to talk about caring for nature.
Learning Benefits
Builds a clear vocabulary for weather versus climate, introduces greenhouse gases and heat-trapping, and shows how scientists gather evidence from ice, tree rings, and space images. The cause-and-effect sequence from energy use to warming to impacts supports reasoning and discussion, while the hopeful closing invites children to connect big ideas to small actions at home.
Structured Knowledge Path
This book sits at the start of climate and Earth-systems literacy. It connects everyday weather observation to the longer-term idea of climate, then links energy choices, greenhouse gases, glaciers, sea level, weather events, and ecosystems. Alongside books about seasons, habitats, and energy, it prepares children for later study of the greenhouse effect, the water cycle, renewable energy, and environmental policy.
Advancement
Later science learning can build on this foundation through the greenhouse effect, the carbon cycle, renewable energy, and habitat protection. The book also teaches a transferable thinking habit: distinguishing one day’s weather from a long-term pattern prepares children to question data, notice trends, and consider consequences in everyday life.
Knowledge Points
- Climate is the pattern of usual weather in a place over many years, not a single day’s conditions.
- Ancient climates were shaped by natural forces such as mountains, oceans, volcanoes, and the sun.
- Burning coal, oil, and gas adds gases like carbon dioxide to the air, and those gases trap heat and warm the planet.
- Scientists use records, glacier ice, tree rings, and space images to see that glaciers are melting, seas are rising, and animals are moving.
- Climate change can bring hotter summers, changing rainfall, bigger storms, floods, and wildfires, which makes life harder for people and farmers.
- Using less energy, walking or riding bikes, planting trees, and protecting wild places are practical ways to help the planet.
Skills
- describe-climate-change-effects
- distinguish-weather-and-climate
- recognize-conservation-responsibility
- trace-fossil-fuels-to-warming
- understand-human-impact-on-habitats
- use-natural-evidence-to-study-climate
Vocabulary
- Climate
- The usual weather in a place over many years.
- Weather
- The daily changes in temperature, rain, and wind.
- Carbon dioxide
- A gas that traps heat in the atmosphere.
- Greenhouse gases
- Gases that warm the Earth by trapping heat.
- Ecosystem
- A community of living things and their environment.
- Renewable energy
- Energy from sources like the sun and wind.
- Glacier
- A large, slow-moving river of ice.
Reading Guidance for Teachers and Guardians
- Page 4: Before reading, ask what the weather is like outside today, then use the page to talk about why one sunny day does not tell us a place’s climate.
- Page 5: Pause and wonder together: how might a mountain, an ocean, or a volcano change the feel of a place over many years?
- Page 7: Ask the child to find the four kinds of clues scientists use, then imagine what a glacier or a tree ring could reveal about the past.
- Page 8: Talk about a local example of heat, rain, or storms, and ask what might happen if that pattern became stronger.
- Page 11: Make a list of energy uses at home and small ways to save energy, then add the actions shown on the page.