Just Grace Goes Green (The Just Grace Series) Paperback - 2009

WHAT GOING GREEN DOES NOT MEAN:

1. Studying frogs.
2. Dressing up as Irish leprechauns.
3. Getting free money.
4. Eating lots of spinach or salad.

WHAT GOING GREEN DOES MEAN: Learning about new ways to save energy, recycle, and save the planet and it’s inhabitants, which means all the plants and animals and us. Miss Lois said our planet needed our help and we were all going to be superheroes of conservation and save the earth! Then she did something that was totally like Mr. Frank and not at all like Miss Lois. She asked us to each design our own superhero costume.

When a project is fun people sometimes want to do even more work than they are supposed to. This doesn’t happen very often, so Miss Lois smiled when she said it was okay to design two different costumes if we wanted.

It was hard to get everybody to stop doing the fun part of saving the earth and concentrate on the learning part of saving the earth. Jane Dublin was especially unhappy when she found out that Miss Lois was not going to take our designs home and make us all real costumes to wear. Her costume was a pretty cool butterfly kind of thing. She would have sure looked great in it because she’s got long, skinny legs kind of like a bug. Other people, like Owen 1, didn’t really do a very good job of thinking about their design as a real costume. It would have been really hard for him to even fit in his.

Miss Lois tried to make everybody feel better by saying that all our designs would make great Halloween costumes. She just doesn’t know that most boys would never wear superhero costumes when they could wear gross masks and creepy clothes dripping with fake blood instead.

"With short, snappy sentences and lots of small black-and-white cartoons, the book features young grade-schoolers’ realistic talks about feeling mad, jealous, and happy with classmates and family (“How to make a bad day worse”).Grace is also concerned about pollution and what kids can do about it, and Harper offers specific suggestions, from recycling and decorating plastic water bottles to saving endangered red pandas, switching off the lights at home, and holding a yard sale. Instead of boring arithmatic, Grace wants exciting lessons about how to save the planet, and readers will want them too after finishing this enjoyable read."--Booklist

"Girls who are settling into chapter book series featuring Clementine and Judy Moody will love the fast pace and familiar school and family situations. Grace’s amusing lists and headlines such as "How to Make a Bad Day Worse" and "What I Did That Was Unusual" will keep readers entertained, and Harper’s sketches add interest and break up the text, leaving the new reader time to pause and smile."--Horn Book

"This is an appealing book for early chapter-book readers. Fans of the series are sure to enjoy it, but it can stand on its own."--School Library Journal

"a fun read for kids and adults."--BookPage