Go Wild has gone international!

Muddy leaf art in Bristol

Go Wild has gone international! This week, we've been out in the woods EVERY DAY with a class of Year 5 pupils from Luckwell Primary School in Bristol taking part in the Paw Prints project. The cool thing about this project (apart from the amount of 'Wild Time' we've been getting) is that three other schools have been doing the same activities on the same day - and two of those schools were in DIFFERENT COUNTRIES!

Grassy leaf art in London

So while we've been messing about in the muddy woods in Bristol and another school in London has been carrying out activities in their local, grassy park, a group of students in Tampere, Finland have been braving the cold and the ice, while children in Mogan, Gran Canaria have been doing the same activities in shorts and T-shirts!

Chilly smelly cocktails in Finland

The less glamorous side of things is the weeks of planning that have gone into producing lesson plans that work in different seasons, climates and habitats while still teaching the children about ecosystems, using all of their senses. I love a challenge and I enjoyed every minute of it!

Activities included recording sound postcards in the dark, making mud faces on trees, creating ephemeral leaf art, meeting trees, making smelly cocktails... The children then uploaded photos that they had taken of the activities onto a website that had been created for the project and had a look at what the other schools had been doing.

Hot smelly cocktails in Gran Canaria

This project was run as a part of a larger initiative from Synchronicity Earth to mark 50 years of the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. The aim was to inspire the next generation of environmental custodians by getting them to explore and understand their local ecosystems.

If you would like to have a go yourself, whether you are a teacher or a parent, you can download the lesson plans from the Paw Prints Website.