Join us on Saturday, 10:00am until noon, for our usual garden stewardship gathering, and come by on Sunday for Kidical Mass followed by a celebration in the garden!
Sunday: Kidical Mass and Garden Celebration
Join Kidical Mass this Sunday, October 22, for a slow, easy-going, and fun group ride focused on kids of all ages and families that will tour the Lincoln Square neighborhood and end with a celebration in Waters Garden!
The bike ride will gather @ Waters Elementary 10:00am; depart @ 10:30am. Festive dress and decorations encouraged. All kids must bring a parent/guardian with a bike.
Cyclists will return to Waters @ 11:00ish for a Garden Celebration until about 1:00pm, including stories, snacks, and activities. The neighborhood garden jam will join the fun during this time as well. All musicians welcome, so bring your instruments!
Focus on… Talking to Children About Climate Change
Our children are going to live through one of the most challenging crises humans have ever faced. On a global scale, the summer of 2023 gave us the hottest months ever recorded, and fires ravaged huge areas of the planet, while other areas experienced extreme rainfall and epic floods. Climate scientists warn that within 10 years this will be our normal summer, and by the time they are grandparents, our children will look back at the summer of 2023 as a mild one.
How do we prepare our children for this crisis? I believe that one element of such preparation is ecology education. Waters Garden enables us to give our children a grounding in field ecology and an understanding of how all the pieces of the puzzle fit together, so that maybe, when everything falls apart, they will have the knowledge that they need to help put it back together. It’s not everything that they will need, but it is something positive that we can do in the face of what can seem like a hopeless problem.
It is not hopeless. There is hope for the future. Amazing people are working to combat climate change, we all should join them in that fight, both in our day-to-day choices and through demanding that our elected representatives enact meaningful change. Even so, it can be difficult to discuss these issues with your children, which is why the 47th Ward Green Council would like to invite you to ‘How to Talk to Children About Climate Change’ on November 9 at 6 p.m. at the Sulzer library. RSVP here.
The “Focus On” series is written by Jeremy Atherton, the parent of a Waters 5th grader. He is a research scientist at Northwestern University Medical School. In addition to volunteering at Waters Garden, he is a steward at Riverbank Neighbors and a member of the 47th Ward Green Council.