An award-winning album with accompanying teaching guides to help kids connect with nature and develop a sense of awe for the environment.
Ask the Planet is an award-winning album of children’s music from the Biomimicry Institute. It was created help children feel connected to nature and develop a sense of awe for the environment. Every song is joyously performed by youth from The Missoula Coyote Choir and Friends. Guest artists include folk greats: Ani DiFranco, Bruce Cockburn, Brandi Carlile, Dar Williams, Erin McKeown, Laura Love, Bill Harley, and Bill Sims, Jr. All songs written by Amy Martin.
The songs on Ask the Planet are a great educational tool in both formal and informal educational settings. Teaching guides and complete lyrics are available for each of the original tracks. Spanish translations for three of the teaching guides are also available.
Teaching Guides Detail
The activities in the guides are appropriate for elementary school youth and include connections to life science, language arts, and social studies.
Each guide includes:
- Intro: Background, the big ideas involved in the song.
- Connections: Keywords to help teachers find songs/lessons that relate to other subject areas
- Objectives: Specific goals of the lessons provided
- Discussion: Questions to help get the students thinking together about the song.
- Activities: Activities that explore the key idea in the song.
- Modifications: Many of the guides contain suggested modifications, using the term “grow it” to show how an activity could be made more complex, and “shrink it” to describe a simplification.
Album Awards
- 2009 Winner iParenting Award
- 2009 Creative Child Preferred Choice Award
- 2009 Winner Parents’ Choice Award
