Blog nature club Anna:

In Cipaganti every week on Friday the Nature Club takes place, an after-school program that seeks to promote consciousness and love of nature in children of any age through many different activities. This week, with the help of Denise, Tara and I, loris puzzles were designed! The puzzles have images of lorises and questions about them, so once the puzzle is completed the children have to answer the questions right: so they can have fun and learn at the same time!

As the children that came to nature club are different ages they were divided in three groups according their age and different puzzles were assigned to them. Sometimes the puzzle was a challenge even for the volunteers and Pak Dendi! But finally, with a lot of enthusiasm and a bit of effort, all the puzzles were solved and the questions about lorises were answered.

Afterwards, the children spent some time coloring images of animals and learning the names of them in English, as Tara and I learnt them in Indonesian! Finally, before leaving, Pak Dendi read aloud a story about animals which all children enjoyed a lot. It was about a monkey with a blue bum!

Now I just have to wait to enjoy the next Nature Club session with these enthusiastic and motivated children!

Forest Protector sessions Tara

The forest protector pack is part of the Little Fireface’s education project. It incorporates a beautifully illustrated children’s book, a matching activity pack and memory game. During my first few weeks at the project I have visited 4 schools with the rest of the team. Two of the schools are in our local area and have nearly finished the program which lasts for around 2.5 months. Each week the children have an activity to complete, which is led by us and a teacher or one of our trackers. The sessions I aided with involved making slow loris (or kukang in Indonesian) face masks, origami and question games. The children seem to really enjoy the lessons and remembered the English words we taught them.

The other two schools were far away in Tasik and we did the introductory sessions which involved a talk about our project and the slow loris and competitions for batik loris bandanas and stickers. After the session our loris mascots came in which the children loved. One of the schools was a high school with a group of 300 kids. The other was a primary school with a group of 40 kids. As these schools are far away the teachers are given teacher packs with instructions and carry out the program themselves.

At the start of the program the children are asked to write a short story about the kukang and draw a picture, the majority of the kids did not know very much about lorises and only wrote a few sentences and we had a range of drawings from insects to turtles. At the end of the program the children are asked to repeat this task, it was really encouraging as the children wrote at least a paragraph and knew a lot about lorises. It would be interesting to revisit the classes in the future to see if they still remembered the lessons.