Learning goes wild!

Education

Education Officer, Andrew, gives us an update on everything he has been up to, including collaboration with the Prince’s Trust.

We have reached the end of another busy summer term, and we were pleased to welcome hundreds of children from many schools to engage with our education programme. Many school groups have visited us before and enjoyed their experiences so much they wished to return with new classes. But there were also several schools that had never been here before, and these too we hope will return. The overwhelmingly positive feedback we have received from teachers suggests so!

Towards the end of 2017 we launched a competition for schools to “find the next David Attenborough”. We challenged schools to narrate a short film of the gannets on the Bass Rock. We had many wonderful entries from many talented children. Our winner was Fraser Findlay from Armadale Primary School in Bathgate. He delivered a wonderful commentary, very confidently and described the action on screen perfectly! As a reward, he and his whole class came to visit the Seabird Centre to see Fraser’s prize-winning film on the big screen in our Wildlife Theatre.

We also welcomed from Sunnyside Primary School the winning class of another competition run by Keep Scotland Beautiful. They made a fantastic sculpture called ‘Gannet With A Sore Tummy’, a poor gannet with a glass stomach full of fish and plastic straws! As part of their prize they got a free education workshop with us here, and their sculpture has been on display in our Education Centre all through the summer term so that all visiting classes this year can see it and learn an important message about plastic waste in our seas.

We have been keen for a long time on getting children to visit us that ordinarily may struggle to get here for various reasons, including economic ones. Thanks to our funders, we have been able to help children from schools identified as being in the lowest 15% on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation. By organising transport for these groups, we have seen a steady increase over the last few years in classes from deprived areas, and this year we saw our highest numbers yet. Many children had access to nature and outdoor learning that would not have been available otherwise, and some enjoyed their first ever visit to the seaside!

Another way to break down barriers to marine education was to take it to them! I was lucky to be able to visit a class in St. Martin’s Primary School with severe disabilities that made transport difficult. I was able to teach them about some key Scottish sea creatures, with lots of fun sensory activities to help them learn. We hope to be able to bring the class out to the beaches here one day soon.

We also collaborated this year with the Prince’s Trust to bring a group of young volunteers who had fallen out of traditional education to our beaches to collect plastic and litter. They engaged well with their task and learned why plastic pollution is such a big problem. We will keep working with the Prince’s Trust in the future to develop this scheme further, with an SOS Puffin trip planned for them very soon!

And the Prince’s Trust wasn’t the only organisation we worked with this term. We have developed a workshop for schools called ‘Claws!’ focusing on lobsters, crabs and other crustaceans. We created this with the Firth of Forth Lobster Hatchery who bring along equipment, posters and live lobsters, from tiny hatchlings to enormous adults, for children to see up close and touch. Broxburn Primary School were brave enough to meet these impressive creatures at the end of June. We also work frequently with the local charity Fidra and their Great Nurdle Hunt, raising awareness of plastics on the beach and in the sea. They came along to help out with Humbie and Saltoun Primary Schools as they took part in beach cleans and hunted for nurdles (small beads of plastic) in the sand.

Holiday Club

Education Officer, Andrew provides an update on all the fantastic fun and games of the Seabird Holiday Club!

It has now been two full years since we began our Seabird Holiday Club programme, and this summer we saw our largest uptake of children yet. We had 28 members in total, and thanks to the hard work of our wonderful volunteers and staff, everyone had a fantastic and rewarding week!

This year, we were also delighted to work in collaboration with the Firth of Forth Lobster Hatchery, who very kindly opened their doors to the Holiday Club for an hour and showed the children the equipment they use, the larvae and juvenile lobsters and the enormous adults. The children were delighted and really enjoyed getting an up close view of these impressive beasts, including a female carrying hundreds of eggs!

As ever, we did lots of exciting science experiments. This time we learned about light and taste. We looked at how white light contains all the colours of the visible spectrum, and then had a go at splitting beams of light into spectra using glass prisms. We also learned about how we taste different things with our tongues and used ‘miracle fruit’ to change our sense of taste (temporarily!) It made lemons taste like cheesecake and oranges like Fanta. Weird!

We also learned about the natural world, and spent an afternoon looking at the amazing variety of fish that can be found in the sea. The children seemed particularly fascinated by some of the stranger species of the deep, such as anglerfish and gulper eels. We also designed our own fish and made beautiful handmade fish decorations to take home.

We are always keen at the Seabird Centre to promote outdoor learning, as the great outdoors makes a wonderful ‘classroom’ for all children and creates a love of nature that they will carry with them throughout their lives. As such, we took the children out every day for lots of different activities. We had a sandcastle competition, explored the rockpools at low tide and enjoyed a nature walk along the beach, collecting interesting items to take home and start their own nature table.

The children’s creative side was let loose too, with a different sea creature craft activity starting off each day. We made paper plate lobsters, woven fish and jellyfish from card and wool. We also built in lots of arts and crafts to our other workshops. To help us learn about light and shadows, we made sea creature shadow puppets!

The children all had a fantastic time with us and we were delighted to be able to welcome so many this time around. Let’s hope for many more exciting adventures to come!

Wildlife Watch

All the highlights from Andrew and the Wildlife Club team this year.

The Wildlife Club has had a super summer term, with lots of fun activities and some wonderful weather too! All three groups enjoyed pond dipping at the base of North Berwick Law. We found lots of interesting creatures, including pond snails, water spiders, dragonfly larvae and plenty of tadpoles. Our Senior Branch also enjoyed a nature hike up the Law, spotting lots of birds, plants and insects and finally reaching the top for a spectacular view.

The Seniors also got a much closer view of the Bass Rock when they took a boat trip out to see the gannets up close. We circled Craigleith on the way and saw lots of puffins, razorbills and even a seal, before heading out to the world’s largest gannet colony to watch them nesting, diving and soaring overhead.

Our younger groups also had lots of fun this term. They were pleased to welcome our local countryside ranger, Sam, on a scavenger hunt for items you can find on the beach. We found lots of interesting shells and seaweeds, as well as items that are bad for the beach. We also got the chance to make some beautiful beach art with our findings.

Our younger members also looked at the wonderful insect life in our surrounding grassy areas thanks to the sunny weather we had this summer. We used sweep nets to comb through the long grass and vegetation and emptied them into a tray so we could see what we had all found. There were lots of flies, beetles, aphids and even a few snails. All very important, not just as wonderful creatures themselves, but as food for the birds and other larger animals.

The major activity we ran this summer term was with our Senior Branch, who over several weeks organised and finally ran a community beach clean. This was in collaboration with Sam, our ranger, as part of the Scottish Government’s Year Of Young People initiative. We wanted to give the children lots of important skills for the future. So they learned about the issues of marine pollution and litter and went out to see the problem on the beaches themselves. They created posters for their beach clean to put up around town,and promoted the event to their school friends and teachers. Come the big day, they ran a sign-in stall, talked all volunteers through the safety rules and why the work they were doing was so important, and handed out equipment. They all did a fantastic job and we were all very pleased with the outcome – over twenty volunteers and several bags of litter cleaned up off the beach. Wonderful work from our Wildlife Clubbers!