A teacher had been in touch asking about climate education resources – specifically, whether I had anything that might work for a whole-school assembly tied to their growing project – and maybe some assemblies in general. A challenge really – climate stories that could speak to Reception and Year 6 at the same time, without talking down to either. Something that wasn’t a slideshow of melting glaciers.
I said I’d think about it. And then, on a walk a few days later it occured to me! There’s a reason Aesop has outlasted almost every other voice from ancient Greece. He understood something about how humans actually change their minds.
We’d been telling these stories for two and a half thousand years. The ant who prepares for winter while the grasshopper plays. The lion who can’t escape the net. The wind who blows harder and harder while the traveller just pulls their coat tighter. It’s very similar to how fairy tales explore danger now matter which century you read them in. And so the school with the garden didn’t need a new story, or a new assembly – they needed to recognise the one they already knew.
What stories do that direct climate communication can’t
The genius of the fable is the distance it creates. When Aesop writes about a fox and some grapes, he isn’t writing about a fox but a story we tell ourselves when we can’t have something we want, amd perhaps we didn’t really want it anyway. But if he’d written that directly, we’d have put the scroll down immediately. We don’t like being told about our own issues and challenges – we never have.
Climate communication has been struggling with this problem for decades. The facts are real. The urgency is real. And yet, as anyone working in this field knows, facts alone don’t shift behaviour. Information is not the same as motivation and we can’t seem to crack that jump from knowing to doing.
Could a good story, or a fable, fable bypasses the defence mechanisms? After all we tell children stories all the time to help with social and moral quandries. These dilemmas arrive as a story, which the brain accepts, and then somewhere inside the story, maybe when grasshopper shrugs off the ant’s invitation, or the traveller pulls their coat tighter against the wind, something might get through. Not because it was argued at the listener but because they could empathise with the character, or at least understand what they were trying to do.
After all, this is why schools make good use of assemblies (I used to love them!!).
The climate stories we’ve been working with
Over the past few weeks, thinking about that school garden and where it might lead, I’ve been developing a series of assemblies under the Ground Level strand of Not Yet Zero – classroom and whole-school resources that take the climate conversation seriously without making it heavy. And fables have turned out to be the most natural home for that work.
Here’s what we’ve done so far:
- The Ant, the Grasshopper and the Garden uses the most obvious fable for the subject but not with the harshest outcome. In the original, Ant refuses to help Grasshopper in winter (and Grasshopper suffers..). Our version doesn’t do that. Ant shares. Because the climate message we actually need isn’t you’ll suffer if you don’t prepare, it’s we grow enough to share, and that’s why we prepare. Extension activities look at actually planting seeds.
- Warmer Than Wind redirects the The Wind and the Sun, it puts them directly in conversation with how we talk about climate change. Wind is right, it has the facts. Wind’s facts are real and the urgency is real. And the traveller pulls their coat tighter every time. Sun doesn’t argue but mentions a garden and the coat comes off. This one has turned out to be the most layered of the series — it works for Year 3 on the level of the story, and for Year 8 on the level of recognising themselves in the traveller’s exhaustion.
- Every Size Counts gives The Lion and the Mouse to the whole school. The Forest Chorus could be KS1, standing completely still when the hunters arrive. The Mouse is played by a Year 3 or 4 pupil who must not squeak, must not perform, must simply be matter-of-fact and certain. Because that’s what Mouse is. The net is the climate crisis. Mouse doesn’t move the whole net. Mouse gnaws at their bit of it, steadily, without stopping. And Lion, big, powerful, stuck, cannot do this alone.
The climate stories that are still waiting
Once I started seeing fables this way, you can’t stop. The canon is full of them – and whilst they may be a bit on the nose, they are very adaptable!
Take The Boy Who Cried Wolf: it’s is almost too perfect for our moment the repeated warnings, the hardening indifference, the wolf that eventually arrives anyway. It could be a tough story to sit with (I remember when I was a child hearing a version of this linked to forest fires) because the moral cuts in uncomfortable directions. Who is the boy? Are we the villagers? Is the wolf already here?
The Crow and the Pitcher – another one to encourage action: the crow who can’t reach the water and drops pebbles in one by one until it rises, is one of the most beautiful descriptions of incremental collective action I know. Every pebble too small to matter. The water rising anyway.
The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs is the story of every extractive industry that has ever existed. The farmer who kills the goose trying to get all the gold at once and destroys the very thing sustaining them. There is a Year 5/6 assembly in that story that I haven’t written yet, but I will.
The Oak and the Reed – one close to me – the great tree that won’t bend in the storm and is uprooted, while the humble reed survives by yielding. Another one that crossses ages – it’s a story about resilience and adaptation that feels increasingly urgent as we enter a period where the climate is already changing and the question shifts from can we prevent it to can we bend without breaking.
Why schools, and why now
There is something specific about the school assembly as a form that makes it unusually suited to this work. A whole school in a hall, for Primary Reception through Year 6, sometimes staff and parents too, or for Secondary a whole year group, is a genuinely rare thing, we don’t have many of those left.
What you put into that assembly time matters, a slideshow of statistics will produce glazed eyes and, in some pupils, anxiety that has nowhere to go. A story however, fun, simply staged, honestly told – produces something else. It produces the feeling of having understood something that is shared (or laughed with).
The teacher who asked me about the school garden was trying to connect her pupils to something real and close and theirs. The growing project was already doing climate education, the children just hadn’t heard it framed that way. The fable gave the frame. The garden was already the lesson.
That’s what these stories do. They find the pattern that was already there.
(A brief nod to the amazing book The Patterning Instinct by Jeremy Lent, massive inspiration to me!)
Rebecca Stacey is a Climate Education Consultant and Carbon Literacy Certified Trainer based in Cumbria. The Ground Level assembly series is available at notyetzero.com. If this piece was useful, you can support the work here.
