Save and Repair

Save and Repair is one of six books in Crabtree’s “Good to Be Green” series that encourages children to embrace environmentally friendly habits. The copyright pages in all the books contain a number of suggested “Before, During and After Prompts” while the penultimate page, “A note about sharing this book”, is directed at any adults who are reading the book with (a) child(ren).This section explains the book’s purpose and suggests ways that adults can use the book with children. The “Good to Be Green” books have all been illustrated by Diane Ewen whose cartoon style artwork presents readers with multiracial characters.

In Save and Repair, the focus is on recycling and reusing toys, especially plastic toys. Readers meet Molly whose bedroom, her mother points out, is a mess, with some of the mess being Molly’s toys that are scattered all over the floor. When Molly trips over a toy and hurts herself, she decides, “Maybe I should clean my room after all”, and she starts with her toys. Molly’s approach is to divide them into two piles – toys to keep and those to throw away, with the latter pile being the much larger. At this point, Mom steps in and makes some suggestions: “If you don’t want these toys, someone else will....Let’s fix any broken toys, and give away what you don’t want.” Mom later adds the idea, “If children traded toys instead of buying new ones, fewer toys would have to be made in the first place. This would save energy and cut pollution.” In a number of instances, the author, via text printed on a blue background, adds some factual information related to a event in the story. For instance, when Molly’s mother looks at the huge pile of Molly’s unwanted toys, she tells her daughter, “You can’t throw all of these away.” And Chancellor’s addition explains why: “We don’t keep our plastic toys for very long. The problem with that is plastic can take over 500 years to break down in a landfill site!”

Following Save and Repair’s main text, Chancellor provides a five-question true/false test plus a “Get Active” page that offers four suggestions to the book’s readers regarding recycling and reusing toys. They include having a toy trading party at school and holding a home-based toy sale (with the monies being donated to charity). Children are encouraged to “Write a story about a toy that is saved from the garbage and sold at a second-hand store.” Chancellor also provides the directions for an experiment to: “See for yourself how slowly plastic breaks down.” As the experiment spans a three-month period, a very long time in a child’s world, carrying out this idea likely needs some adult monitoring. The book’s final page is shared by a glossary and an index, with the former consisting of words that had been bolded in the text.

Though the idea of fixing, trading and giving away toys can be introduced in the classroom and perhaps be reinforced by actually holding a classroom toy trading event, to be truly effective, the contents of Save and Repair need to be shared, discussed and acted upon by parents and their children.