ABOUT SAFE AND HAPPY
WELCOME to our book's website, Safe and Happy: A Children's Field Guide to Thriving in a Pandemic ! We wrote and illustrated our field guide from March to November 2020. As we adjusted to wearing masks and physical distancing, we worked outside in rural Minnesota, in the village of Grand Marais (population,~ 1,400) on the north shore of Lake Superior during our Story Scouts publishing club, which you see in the video below. In it, we are illustrating how we feel about coronavirus. Watch it and tell us if we are communicating clearly! WHY? We created our field guide to inspire others to invent screen-free, no- or low-cost constructive ways for families to stay active, creative, connected and healthy during these frightening times. Hey, make a cooking show! You can check out ours below, teaming with our parter Cook County Whole Foods Co-op. Staying connected and respectful of others is how communities thrive—and have fun! If you need a curriculum for our activities -- download our free, fun, curriculum here! We field tested it! It works!
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Our field guide provides a child's-eye view of the historic coronavirus pandemic year of 2020. It was a year of unprecedented worldwide trauma—and we document ways we invented and field tested to thrive and stay safe and happy. We're working on our 2021 version now!
Safe and Happy: A Children's Field Guide to Thriving in a Pandemic is a creative collaboration of the 501 (c)(3) nonprofit charity, Minnesota Children's Press and its Pandemic Publishing with Children Project ; Cook County Public Health and Human Services and a general CARES Act grant from the U.S. government.
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About Story Scouts
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Story Scouts is an entrepreneurial publishing club for rural Minnesota kids ages 5-15 who want to write, illustrate, and publish their own books, newspapers, websites, comics, graphic novels, blogs, and more. Story Scouts sell their published products as fundraisers to support community projects they identify, while also building personal portfolios to be college- and career-ready.
Held mostly outdoors, Story Scouts Pandemic-proof our meetings by remaining true to Cook County’s Norwegian settlers’ heritage: We practice friluftsliv and meet in outdoor classrooms, forests, parks, and yards—with exceptions for extreme weather. Friluftsliv is the Norwegian word describing the Nordic culture of outdoor “free air” living. Mentored by proven Minnesota Children's Press professional authors, designers, artists, editors, and communication experts, Story Scouts learn skills and earn achievement badges for demonstrating 21st century communication competencies. |
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A message from Anne Brataas, President of Minnesota Children's Press, and mentor to all the Story Scouts who helped make this book: Safe and Happy: A Children's Field Guide to Thriving in a Pandemic.
A Field Guide Is…Purpose & Methods
A field guide is a biology book designed to help you identify, locate and understand what you observe outside in wild nature.
As a zoologist, I wrote my first field guide to selected animals, plants and rocks of Minnesota in 1996: North Country Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to the Great Outdoors, a compilation of my weekly science columns in the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper. In 1997, I created a similar weekly nature column called Field Trip for Microsoft’s digital news feed, Sidewalk. Since then, I have been an award-winning science writer, newspaper columnist, science curriculum designer, teacher, children’s book author, publisher, writing professor, non-profit organization executive, wife, mother, teacher, mentor, friend. Most of all, I have tried to be a friend and witness to young children.
Like my first field guides, this one is also about seeing and understanding what you see. It aims to create community and wellbeing through understanding. But it focuses on animals not covered by other field guides: human children in their natural habitats and in the most unnatural of conditions, the four, fear-spangled seasons of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
Unlike my first field guides, this one is written largely by others: children outdoors with me, masked and 6ish-feet apart. I am the note-taking amanuensis in the woods. I record their thoughts and actions as they observe, experience and interact with the world I structure for them through creative projects, writing, and drawing prompts, and an infinite cornucopia of art supplies, craft materials, toys, found objects, recycling, cool sticks. Their narrated and drawn experiences of our many projects are the heart of this field guide. To publish them in the professional style you see in Part I, Minnesota Children’s Press mentors integrate and edit their stories and conversations, scan and digitally refine artwork, enhance ideas and emotions visually with stick figure illustrations. In Part II, we relate 10 of our child field-tested projects that you can do at home, school, or sacred spaces. Go ahead, do ’em! When you are a child, there is no such thing as doing something once. Over and over is best, and makes things better.
By relating children’s words and pictures in these brittle days and fragile plans of the pandemic of 2020-2021, this field guide invites you to see and hear children ages 5-15 with a force and clarity that transcends adult fears for their future. We see children delight in and vivify the real, physical world moment by moment with inborn creative coping reserves and generosity. Children’s natural and expansive playfulness means they incline to make and give more, not less. Generosity is their natural habitat; abundance of possibility their original habit of mind.
Now—more than ever—we as adults must unfailingly nurture these childhood attributes by creating conditions in which they thrive, vivified through curiosity, wonder, and imagination; immersive knowledge and sensory experiences; outdoor nature play—with friends when safely possible. And of course, always with loving and beneficent witnesses of family and trusted caregivers. That traumatic elements stalk us all is undeniable. Still, imagination creatively and purposefully deployed can blunt trauma and lift us up to both safety and happiness.
To me, once an observer of the wild natural world, this field guide contains species accounts of the organism I think of in science pidgin as Child Mirabilis. The miraculous young one.
Originating from children’s own mouths and hands, stories in this field guide help adults identify ways to keep children safe and happy in a pandemic. May it inspire and guide us all to actions that serve those ends.
Anne Brataas
Minnesota Children’s Press, www.minnchildpress.org
Founder and Executive Director
Grand Marais, Minnesota, U.S.A.
December 2020
As a zoologist, I wrote my first field guide to selected animals, plants and rocks of Minnesota in 1996: North Country Almanac: A Seasonal Guide to the Great Outdoors, a compilation of my weekly science columns in the St. Paul Pioneer Press newspaper. In 1997, I created a similar weekly nature column called Field Trip for Microsoft’s digital news feed, Sidewalk. Since then, I have been an award-winning science writer, newspaper columnist, science curriculum designer, teacher, children’s book author, publisher, writing professor, non-profit organization executive, wife, mother, teacher, mentor, friend. Most of all, I have tried to be a friend and witness to young children.
Like my first field guides, this one is also about seeing and understanding what you see. It aims to create community and wellbeing through understanding. But it focuses on animals not covered by other field guides: human children in their natural habitats and in the most unnatural of conditions, the four, fear-spangled seasons of the coronavirus pandemic in 2020.
Unlike my first field guides, this one is written largely by others: children outdoors with me, masked and 6ish-feet apart. I am the note-taking amanuensis in the woods. I record their thoughts and actions as they observe, experience and interact with the world I structure for them through creative projects, writing, and drawing prompts, and an infinite cornucopia of art supplies, craft materials, toys, found objects, recycling, cool sticks. Their narrated and drawn experiences of our many projects are the heart of this field guide. To publish them in the professional style you see in Part I, Minnesota Children’s Press mentors integrate and edit their stories and conversations, scan and digitally refine artwork, enhance ideas and emotions visually with stick figure illustrations. In Part II, we relate 10 of our child field-tested projects that you can do at home, school, or sacred spaces. Go ahead, do ’em! When you are a child, there is no such thing as doing something once. Over and over is best, and makes things better.
By relating children’s words and pictures in these brittle days and fragile plans of the pandemic of 2020-2021, this field guide invites you to see and hear children ages 5-15 with a force and clarity that transcends adult fears for their future. We see children delight in and vivify the real, physical world moment by moment with inborn creative coping reserves and generosity. Children’s natural and expansive playfulness means they incline to make and give more, not less. Generosity is their natural habitat; abundance of possibility their original habit of mind.
Now—more than ever—we as adults must unfailingly nurture these childhood attributes by creating conditions in which they thrive, vivified through curiosity, wonder, and imagination; immersive knowledge and sensory experiences; outdoor nature play—with friends when safely possible. And of course, always with loving and beneficent witnesses of family and trusted caregivers. That traumatic elements stalk us all is undeniable. Still, imagination creatively and purposefully deployed can blunt trauma and lift us up to both safety and happiness.
To me, once an observer of the wild natural world, this field guide contains species accounts of the organism I think of in science pidgin as Child Mirabilis. The miraculous young one.
Originating from children’s own mouths and hands, stories in this field guide help adults identify ways to keep children safe and happy in a pandemic. May it inspire and guide us all to actions that serve those ends.
Anne Brataas
Minnesota Children’s Press, www.minnchildpress.org
Founder and Executive Director
Grand Marais, Minnesota, U.S.A.
December 2020
About Minnesota Children's Press |
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Minnesota Children's Press www.minnchildpress.org is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, tax-exempt charity based in Grand Marais, Minnesota. Our mission is to mentor entrepreneurial writing and illustration to help rural children ages 5-15 years, illustrate, publish and sell their books, newspapers, websites and other print and digital publishing to fund civic betterment projects.
Through local sense-of-place storycraft and youth publishing, we seek to enrich and expand the sense of shared purpose and inclusive Commons in every rural community.
We prepare rural children for success in 21st century communication technologies and skills by helping them create career-relevant portfolios by the time they enter high school.
We believe that starting in 2020, with the pandemic sheltering-in lifestyles, and going forward, children will mature into having successful careers and communities that will be based on competencies in:
We agree with leading thinkers and economists--read Professor Robert Reich's BerkleyBlog--who believe the pandemic will reshape the future of work into four job categories: the remotes, the essentials, the unpaid, the forgotten.
Minnesota Children's Press kids will not be unpaid or forgotten. We excel in the first two categories. Please join us in our mission to help them continue to thrive.
Childhood It's better with blue skies, bumper bubbles, and books—books written and illustrated by kids with Minnesota Children's Press mentors!
Through local sense-of-place storycraft and youth publishing, we seek to enrich and expand the sense of shared purpose and inclusive Commons in every rural community.
We prepare rural children for success in 21st century communication technologies and skills by helping them create career-relevant portfolios by the time they enter high school.
We believe that starting in 2020, with the pandemic sheltering-in lifestyles, and going forward, children will mature into having successful careers and communities that will be based on competencies in:
- creativity & imaginative capacity for innovation
- collaborative problem-solving for an empathy-informed greater good
- respectful, objective, evidence-based communication in all formats
- ethical behaviour & integrity
- digital media fluency & literacy
- mastery of remote working skills and technologies. Yes, the Zoom Boom!
We agree with leading thinkers and economists--read Professor Robert Reich's BerkleyBlog--who believe the pandemic will reshape the future of work into four job categories: the remotes, the essentials, the unpaid, the forgotten.
Minnesota Children's Press kids will not be unpaid or forgotten. We excel in the first two categories. Please join us in our mission to help them continue to thrive.
Childhood It's better with blue skies, bumper bubbles, and books—books written and illustrated by kids with Minnesota Children's Press mentors!
About Co-Co Books
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Co-Co Books is a creative, community-building, youth-nurturing communication response to the global coronavirus pandemic of 2020. Minnesota Children’s Press created this special imprint and logo in March 2020 after public health stay-at-home orders were issued to contain the spread of the pandemic. We are an artistic intervention in disrupted youth development. It is our means of coping with and surmounting the pandemic challenges to hope, unity, and mental health. We choose to meet these challenges with creativity and originality, while living in sympathy with each other, striving to promote just and generative well-being.
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