Blue Peter Badge

Well the Blue Peter team would’ve been proud of me yesterday, even without the use of sticky backed plastic!! I thought my days of making educational resources out of cornflake packets and pieces of string were long over - but to my delight no!!

Yesterday was my first visit to a Seychelles school to meet some of the children for an hour and I had the challenge of telling them about the island with very limited resources. But no problem – I thought, the old ones are the best and so I set to preparing the food chain game. The only equipment needed were scissors, used cornflake packets, print outs from the computer, glue and string – excellent – oh and of course cellotape as we don’t have laminater.

The children I went to work with were from Grand Anse Primary, which is the main village where we moor up for our shopping on Praslin. The school has formed a group called the Eco-Aride Club and I plan to be working with them, together with other schools on and off through the year. I must admit I was a little apprehensive about going into a school unable to speak the local language, with a scorched white face, but I needn’t have been. All the schools are really keen on environmental education in all aspects of the curriculum. The children were extremely well behaved and really smiley, and the teachers that I meet again yesterday were quite amused that I arrived dry and presentable, unlike the week before when a drown rat comes to mind!

It was a great first session with the children and as well as talking about Aride and food chains we talked about linking up with Meare Village Primary School back in Somerset. The group were really excited and look forward to introducing themselves to the Somerset children. Ideally we need to get them an internet connection sorted out, but until them I hope to facilitate and bring things back to the island to go on line.

It was a really motivating and rejuvenating afternoon, I never thought in a million years that I would ever have the opportunity to work with Seychellois children talking about the food chain of a fairy tern. The next challenge is yet again down to logistics – to get the group on to the island – I need to twice the arm of a nice man with a nice boat!