The project ‘Earth Action ’by Della Burford is to take the “Magical Earth Secret” book which is a best- seller in Canada and and been a performance in New York, Canada, and Japan and come up with an Activity Guide for children to encourage ecological action in the world. The book is called Earth Action. It will be able to also be used independently or with the picture book.
Dale Bertrand has helped me to take the activities developed in the original guide idea which has been developed over many years and adapt these activities to today. Jacquie Howardson has helped in editing.
The idea in Earth Action is to “Take your love of Nature into Action”. Also to know “You can make a difference”.
In Magical Earth Secrets the Eagle Child loses its colors because of pollution With the l help of the little people of the four directions in the we are reminded to take care of the Earth, Water, Air, and renew our connection to the Sun and Star. We must love and protect the earth.
In the guide we see Nature Wheels that show us the Cycles of Nature and remind us that these are all connected.
We also see Art, Music, Drama, Dance, and Making Book Activities.
To honor the work of Buckminster Fuller the book ‘Earth Action’ is dedicated to him and his work.
Six Inventions have been highlighted and seven Bucky Activity Cards created.
Peter Meisen helped me with the Renewable Energy section which is a vital part of the guide and appreciated him sharing the Geni project’s section on what is the potential of various countries renewables. An Activity to show some of this via collage became the Bucky activity on a Dymaxion Map. He was part of the development of a super website called Geni which in one part shows the potential Renewable Energy in various counties.
The guide is cross curricular with one activity leading into another. In gratitude that William Meyerhoff has helped me in going through pages of the guide and has come up with some Geometric 3-D model Activities. The Guide is cross curricular. For example the Activity that William Meyerhoff shared on making a GeoSphere and Tetrahedron can move then into writing and learning more about Cycles of Nature and finding both problems and solutions. This can then move into the Picture Books in which they design a book to share their ideas with others. And that then can move into making a Puppet Theatre.
In going through the Space Camp program at the Buckminster Fuller Foundation I have enjoyed the Office Hours and have applied the concepts learned from the talks given.
In hearing Tom Chi speak in Office Hours in the Space Camp I learned about Prototyping and organizing and visualizing my Mission of “creating the Guide”. I saw this project in a new way. I was particularly moved at him having us identify the audience and visualizing how it should look. It made me focus on the children and see the project in color and with sound. Afterwards I saw the layout and storyboarded it more clearly. I was able to reduce the number of page to one half. And my original idea was in black and white but this was in color.
Barbara Wall’s talk also struck home and showed how important the indigenous wisdom is and reminded me of a project in which I was privileged to facilitate at the Wandering Spirit School in Toronto with the founders Vern Harper and Pauline Shirt in which I did 4 or 5 projects between 1979 -1984. Here we did the first Magical Earth Secrets mural. This is shown in the guide.
In hearing Janine Benyus talk it was very meaningful to hear about Biomimicry and see her website Asknature.I have put a link to this in the guide. Even when teaching college in the 70’s I had my students look at photos from nature in National Geographics and design rooms around design elements and principles they saw. I have two activities in the guide using nature as inspiration .. Your Dymaxion House – and the Eye Dome where they use Bucky Fly’s Eye Dome as inspiration and draw an Eye Dome with different animals eyes or even spots of different animals.
In Mike McManus talk on using white boards and seeing nouns as blobs and verbs as arrows this struck home with me as in my Water Cycle wheel I have arrows showing the water dissolving, vaporating, cooling, and becoming snow and rain. This is an idea I believe children can relate too and will include it will a “Make your own water wheel drawing and writing activity in the guide.
When Eagle Child finds the Magical Earth Secrets it flies to space and sees the planet Earth from above.. it realizes all is one. It see all the people doing what they can do to love and take care of the earth.
Thanks to so many .. especially Faith Flanigan, Jazmine Cable, and Amber at the Buckminister Fuller Institute. And to the many who shared their ideas.. doing a final edit but it is available now online in Amazon as a soft cover book and as a digital book on Kindle books.
I hope you can share this with others in your personal connections or on social media. Any ideas to share this further would help. If you do a activity from the guide with your child, niece, nephew, or grandchild let me know and I will feature it on the blog. I am at dellaburford@hotmail.com
In Gratitude
Della Burford
Create a Dream, with Della Burford 