Born Free Foundation - Keep Wildlife in the Wild

by Christine Le Roux, Education Manager

Our education program has been really quiet as we have been closed for the festive season. We officially opened on the 17^th and started with a bang, a fully booked week of schools coming!!!

Eco-Schools

We had our first meeting for the year to plan the year ahead and all the schools  were very excited to tackle on the new year. All the schools will be going for their Green Flag which will mean a lot of work. They will need to do 3 action projects (projects that make a positive change towards their school, environment and the community) and submit 9 environmentally focused lesson plans! But I am going to help them all the way. We reflected on our successes last year and decided that this year must do a repeat of Rhino Day and the Clean Up Day as they were both great success last year.

Global Friends

My goal for Global Friends this year is to set up a library that all three the schools in Paterson can make use of. The Eastern Cape Province has the highest rate of illiteracy in South Africa, which results in many learners leaving school not being able to read English properly. The reason for this is lack of access to books and the internet. Added to this is the fact that the curriculum of South Africa is outcomes based, i.e. a set of outcomes is given to teachers for each subject and grade and how they go about achieving them is up to the teacher. Textbooks aren’t really used at all so in order to set out quality lesson plans teachers need access to good resources. The Eco-Schools program has helped considerably with that as we assist teachers with developing lesson plans that are environmentally focused, but they do need access to other literature.

In Paterson particularly this is a huge problem. The only library is way on the other side of town and people need to cross the incredibly dangerous and truck ridden N10 (national road). Some learners have to travel 10km+ to get there.   To make matters worse, the Paterson library is poor with very limited good reading material.    Learners and teachers basically have to travel long distances (by foot as few have cars) and risk their lives to get to a library that is poorly resourced.   This is why I have decided to set up a library at one of the schools.

The WWE volunteers also helped me to make the benches for the Environmental clubhouse for Hendrik Kanise which brings this project to a close. We will deliver them next week along with wildlife documentary DVDs (and the Born Free DVD of course) as well some nice posters.