Using stories to change the world - downloadable activities

In this blog post we demonstrate how you can bring climate and sustainability topics into your classroom with our free teaching ideas based on stories from Cambridge Reading Adventures.

What is the Cambridge Reading Adventures series?

Learners can explore space, sail with pirate queens and travel back to the Ice Age with Cambridge Reading Adventure’s diverse range of fiction and non-fiction. We’ve developed the series with experts at the UCL Institute of Education’s International Literacy Centre to provide structured progression through book bands, helping learners become confident, independent readers. With over 140 titles across 11 Book Bands and four Strands, Cambridge Reading Adventures takes children from being a new reader in Pink A and B Bands to being fluent, independent readers at the Voyagers Strand. The series is mapped to a range of international curricula including IPC, PYP, Cambridge Primary and the YLE syllabus.

How does Cambridge Reading Adventures help you teach about climate change?

The Cambridge Reading Adventures series includes meaningful, inspirational stories for learners all around the world who are starting to read. The series includes themes and topics with international relevance such as topics around climate, the environment and conservation, which are universally important and relevant. We have books on the climate change process, pollution and recycling. Over 60 of the books in the 140+ series have links to climate change work.

We selected six of these titles and created a teaching environment around them. For each reading book the story is the stimulus. For example, one of the stories for 5–6-year-old children is called Seagull. It’s about two young children who find a seagull on a beach, but it is covered in oil and litter, it’s a sticky mess. The children try to clean the seagull, so it can go on with its life and be happy. There are clear opportunities to learn about why the seagull was in the condition, which can be connected to various themes. We drew on these themes and then developed them with various activities and teaching around the concepts. In this case we focused on plastic pollution, what’s going into the ocean and how we avoid this kind of behaviour.

A very powerful learning project came out of Seagull and we have created five more for to you to work with your learners on. These stories bring climate and sustainability into the classroom in an easy and enjoyable way, and then schools can take ideas one step further with the teaching, projects and activities that follow from the reading book.

Why are stories important for education?

We worked with author Cindy Forde on the project. In an interview about the project on our Brighter Thinking Pod ‘Teaching the climate emergency’ Cindy said:

‘…everything does start with a story. Stories are some of the most powerful things…these are the things that really shape your formative view on the world. So being awakened to these, it sounds small, but it’s a kind of awakening, a sensitising, which I think is really important to happen in those early years…We want to enhance these already beautiful reading adventures with the teaching and learning activities that really enhance that sense of wonder and awe. We’re learning about this stuff but hey look at the actions we can take, the adventures we can have learning how to transform and make our world an even more beautiful place. We’re dealing with very small children so we really want to give them that sense of delight and possibility’

Listen to the full episode:

Climate change and the environment can be difficult topics to discuss with very young learners, however, stories can be the way in to conveying those ideas, with curiosity and interest. When asked how do you bring these big ideas into the classroom Cindy said:

‘The Cambridge Reading Adventures series is a really great way of doing it. You’re inviting children in, through these stories. Through a small story you can introduce a big idea’.

Dependent on the age of your learners you can keep extending and expanding these ideas and integrating them into your lessons. Download your free teaching ideas below and bring climate and sustainability topics into your classroom with Cambridge Reading Adventures. Bring the wonder and awe into your classroom and plant seeds of inspiration to help learners be ready for the world.