Education activities are kicking off
After publishing our new education booklet this past autumn, our education initiative is kicking into high gear this spring! Thanks to our motivated and dedicated partners in crime Elza Makaradze, Dachi Shoshitashvili, and Nature Conservation Georgia, we’ve organized engaging activities at over a dozen schools across the Batumi bottleneck region. We’re pulling out all the stops to inspire and empower educational institutions to launch Bird Clubs. With both the workshops and our education booklet, we aim to foster a deeper connection between children and nature.
Over the past weeks, Elza and Dachi organised a workshop attended by 21 teachers from the Kobuleti municipality. In addition, Dachi spent a week visiting 12 schools in the region, with a total of 293 students and 53 teachers attending the activities.
The initiative, funded by the British Bird Charitable Trust (BBCT) and IJsvogelfonds, has been well received! Aside from distributing the education booklet and collaborating with schools, we will expand our activities during the Batumi Birdwatching Festival in 2024, demonstrating the project's success and potential impact on conservation in the Batumi bottleneck and beyond.
Follow our social media and keep an eye on the newsletter to stay tuned for more exciting updates as the year unfolds.
Teaching teachers in Georgia about birds
In 2019 BRC started an educational project involving schools, teachers and Georgian conservationists, with the support of British Birds Charitable Trust (BBCT) and IJsvogelfonds of Birdlife the Netherlands. The aim of the project was to bring birds into Georgian schools as a teaching tool, empowering teachers more in the educational process than in content development. The project mostly reaches the villages which are close to the count stations. In September 2019 we organised the first two workshops with the teachers of the schools involved.
The project unfortunately had to stop due to COVID, but this actually led us to work on the edition of an educational booklet in kartuli for teachers and educators. This resulted in a beautiful work of art, with many illustrations. The 60-page book is ready to print now and will show educators how to teach students about birds, their biology, ecology, migration and conservation. At the end of the book there are 6 proposals for activities to do throughout the year. Teachers can choose to adapt these activities to their groups to explore nature through birds. This new material has been developed together with the Georgian teachers and considered all the material already created beforehand in the country. We hope it will be a very useful tool for educational centres throughout Georgia.
During the next season we will also develop a calendar with bird-related activities. After the teachers and their students have worked with the book for a while, we want to organise field trips for the schools already next year.
Drawings were made by Elien Hoekstra and Rafa Benjumea and many thanks to our Elza Makaradze, Aslan Bolkvadze and Dachi Shoshitashvili
Autumn Report 2019 published
Adult male dark morph Marsh Harrier. Photo by Bart Hoekstra.
The 12th season brought unprecedented numbers of Black Kites, a new raptor species for the BRC counts, and marked the start of an education project in collaboration with local teachers. You can read about that, and a LOT more, in the extensive report of the last season. Make sure to scroll all the way to the bottom for the behind-the-scenes gallery.
Have fun reading!