Mudd Saves the Earth:
Booger Glue, Cow Diapers, and other Good Ideas

Mudd is on a mission to save the Earth with his best friends Art and Pie. He lives with Auntie Pine, Uncle Foozle, and their renter Marshmallow. Those aren’t their real names but that’s what Mudd calls them. Auntie Pine tells Mudd every day that it up to him and all other kids to recycle, reuse, and reduce to save the planet.

Mudd and his friends really want to help, but their “good” ideas, such as recycling boogers into glue, often backfire. With gentle humor, the author explores environmental issues—recycling, global warming, saving trees and wild animals, water pollution, littering— in kid terms, and provides tips at the end of each chapter on what they can really do to help save the Earth.

Mudd is illustrated by cartoonist Joe Kohl, whose work has appeared in numerous publications.

 

An excerpt from “Cow Diapers”

“How are you going to put diapers on the cows?” Art asked me.

I hadn’t thought about that. In fact, I’d never been on the same side of a fence as a cow.

“We’ll need to distract them,” I said, after mushing the problem about in my brain for three minutes. Art and Pie waited. Finally Art said, “How?”

“We’ll show them a movie. While they’re watching it, we’ll sneak up behind them and zappo! We’ll slap those diapers on and fasten sticky tabs to hold them in place,” I said.

“What movie?” asked Pie.

“Probably a cartoon. Bugs Bunny or something about a farm. Nothing scary,” I said. “When cows get scared, they stampede. They’ll run everywhere.”

Sample activity for what kids can do to save the Earth:
Pick up bottles and cans in your neighborhood and put them in the right recycling bins.

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Reader Comments

“It’s a hoot!” David Black

“Mudd’s endearing,” Julie Franklin

 

Links

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/stories/Spaces/Science/Green-tips/
www.greenlivingtips.com
www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/kids/globalwarming.html
http://www.epa.gov/kids/
http://www.dep.state.fl.us/secretary/kids/activities/default.htm

Worm farms
www.greenlivingtips.com/articles/41/1/Worm-farms-and-vermicomposting/