Ivy & Bean – What’s the Big Idea?

Annie Barrows writes Ivy and Bean for 7 year olds, and in What's the Big Idea? the whole of the second grade has to enter the science fair.

Bean is outside in the garden because of a stapler incident. Ivy is beside her on the classroom rug, trying to cross one eye without crossing the other. They're best friends, they're both very easily distracted, and that's most of the charm.

The science fair has a theme this year and the theme is global warming. Four older pupils turn up to explain it with posters, including a photograph of a worried polar bear, and finish by announcing that the whole thing is a disaster and it's all our fault. The second grade takes this rather hard.

Ivy and Bean end up slumped on a bench afterwards like two sacks of potatoes, fretting about polar bears, while a boy stands in front of them asking if they'd like a game of stomp tag.

Barrows is so good on how children actually behave. Every day at rug time the class races to sit on Colorado, because Colorado has the Rocky Mountains in it, and whoever gets there gets to shout I rock. Bean plays dead on the lawn in the hope that her mother will feel bad. She digs up her own buried treasure out of boredom and finds the same tweezers and dental floss she buried a fortnight ago.

There's a lovely quiet bit too, where Bean watches an ant through a magnifying glass, works out that she must look like a planet to it, and then wonders who might be looking at her.

The book finishes with a plain question and answer section about global warming written for children, covering things like why we can't simply hang mirrors in space. It's genuinely useful and not remotely preachy.

That's the one thing to weigh up before you hand it over. The story doesn't pretend climate change isn't frightening, and a child who already worries may pick the worry up. It also shows two children deciding to do something rather than sit with it, which helps a great deal.

If this one goes down well, they might also like Judy Moody, another girl with strong opinions and a plan, who starts a brand new school year in a spectacularly bad mood and sets about fixing it.