What the World Needs Now is an environmental children’s book series for ages 4-8 that aims to connect the world’s youngest book lovers to the importance of nature, and our place in it.
Each book in the series follows a friendly animal through its habitat, helping kids learn about one thing the world needs now, be it more trees or bees or less plastic, to maintain a healthy planet.
The series is designed to help parents and educators lay the foundation for future learning on the world’s most pressing environmental challenges. But for our littlest kids, the connection starts at a much simpler point: their first job is to fall in love with nature - because you don’t protect what you don’t love.
The books support engaging with our kids on how we can better respect and care for the only planet we have.
This is a brand-new adventure for me - completely independent and self-published! And it feels like the culmination of everything I have ever worked on.
SYNOPSIS:
Inside the sprawling forests of Ontario, Canada lives a friendly black bear named Melly.
One of Melly’s favourite things to do is EAT! And many of the delicious fruits she snacks on wouldn’t grow without the help of some very important little forest creatures.
What the World Needs Now: Bees! explores the vital role busy, busy bees play in helping plants to grow the food people and animals love to eat.
MY THOUGHTS:
This is such a gorgeous picture book and you cannot help but fall in love with Melly. The illustrations jump right off of the page; their bright, colourful and cute design will have children mesmerized and engaged. The story is such an important one, demonstrating how important the role bees play and how to protect them so that they can continue to do their job of pollination.
I read this book to my class which tied in beautifully with our science topic of plants. The children thoroughly enjoyed the story, exploring the illustrations with care and completely understood the concept of what bees do and why it is so important to us (producing food) and the environment. We had lots of discussions afterwards and a real sense of understanding on how to encourage more bees into our gardens. We will now see if we can adapt the schools grounds to encourage more bees to visit.
I absolutely love this series and cannot wait to see where the series takes us next. Many thanks to Love Book Tours for inviting me to join the blog tour.
The UK Shopify online store is now open for business: www.Environmentalkids.co.uk. We are really proud of our set up in the UK. All books in the series are printed in and shipped from the UK, which means we can pass along shipping savings to the customer, and the books have the lowest carbon footprint possible.
100% recycled paper, biodegradable lamination, vegetable-based inks and carbon-balanced printing we use, and now more than ever, these are books you can feel REALLY good about buying.
Author Bio
I was born and raised in Southern Ontario, Canada in the cities of Burlington and St. Catharines. Long before the internet and mobile phones (now I’m aging myself!), my childhood was spent in forests and parks, on bike rides, and playing hide and seek until the streetlights came on. My family did comical Griswold-style road trips in wood-paneled station wagons. We spent summers swimming in friends’ backyards. These are my very fortunate roots.
I knew from an early age that my destiny would take me far from Southern Ontario. I graduated high school and moved to Montreal to study international politics at McGill University. The subject fascinated me, but as graduation approached, I realized I didn’t know what I wanted to do with a degree in international politics. I didn’t want to become a lawyer. I didn’t want to become a politician or civil servant. The media industry, on the other hand, intrigued me.
The West Coast of Canada also intrigued me. So, after graduating McGill, I packed up again, moved to Vancouver and took the first media job I could get at a local Top 40 radio station (Z.95.3) in Vancouver. Best job. Great bosses. I learned so much. But after a couple of years there, the winds of change came calling again.
September 11, 2001. In a heartbeat, Z95.3 went from playing Britney Spears to reporting up-to-the-minute information on the local, national and international fallout of the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington. In that moment, I knew I had found my calling. I wanted to do something that was needed on a good day, and needed even more on a bad day. I wanted to become a full-time journalist.
So, I packed my bags again (a running theme in my life), and moved to Ottawa, Ontario to do my Masters of Journalism. Another incredible two years culminated in me getting a research internship with the Canadian Broadcast Corporation (CBC) in London, England. That position helped me land back in Montreal for a second chapter there as local news reporter for the CBC. While I was there, I wore just about every hat you could in CBC’s radio and TV newsrooms. Depending on the day, I was a researcher, producer, reporter, or online writer. I even filled in for the weather reports every once in a while.