Tag: Learn
Did you know that over 50% of store cupboard products contain palm oil? The unsustainable production of palm oil is one of the BIGGEST threats facing the forests and wildlife of Borneo and Sumatra right now. That’s why, at Chester Zoo, we support the production of SUSTAINABLE PALM OIL.
We’re working together with partners in South East Asia to protect the incredible rainforests that are being threatened by deforestation for agriculture – mainly oil palm production. By supporting sustainable palm oil plantations, who make a commitment to be deforestation free and create wildlife corridors, we can all make a huge difference to wildlife and our mission of preventing extinction!
Our education programmes are an important part of our mission of preventing extinction. They inspire people to care about and, more importantly, take action for the natural world. We deliver a lot of our education activities with people when they visit the zoo, but we know not everyone is able to come to us.
To achieve our conservation mission, it’s important that we reach as many people as possible. So, in 2009, we took the zoo on the road and launched our free Safari Ranger outreach service, taking zoo education workshops out to schools and community groups in our local area.
We started with one Safari Ranger and a handful of workshops for primary school aged children. Over the last decade, our offer and team has grown hugely. We now work across the North West of England and into North Wales. In 2019, we delivered a huge 2,500 workshops engaging almost 80,000 participants ranging from early years groups through to university aged students, and everything in between.
Whilst Safari Ranger workshops can be booked by any school within a 60 minute drive of the zoo, we have particularly focused our projects on those schools who might face additional barriers to visiting. We aim to work with schools who have had limited previous engagement with the zoo and who have high numbers of pupils eligible for free school meals. Projects are linked to one of our main conservation campaigns and aim to empower pupils to act for wildlife, as well as generating learning across the curriculum.
Since the pilot phase, 100s of schools have been involved in taking action for our Sing for Songbirds campaign, our Sustainable Palm Oil Challenge and more recently our Wildlife Connections campaign which focuses on the threats facing UK Wildlife. Each project involves multiple visits from our team to the school and a trip to the zoo. In some cases, families from those schools are also supported to visit the zoo with free tickets and resources linked to their children’s learning.
Rainforests are AMAZING. These incredible places cover only 6% of the Earth’s surface but they contain more than 1/2 of the world’s plant and animal species! Not only that but they can be great inspiration for learning across a whole range of subjects.
Our online learning resource platform contains more than 60 different resources to inspire learning about rainforests and rainforest species. Follow our step by step guide below to get the most out of them. By making the research more or less detailed rainforest activities can be adapted for different ages, but most of these resources are best suited to learners aged 7–11 years.
School children, aged 9-11, have completed a ‘take-over’ of the zoo, delivering public talks to inspire thousands of visitors to take action for wildlife.
Chester Zoo and Ignite Teaching School Alliance are partners in developing and delivering our #IgniteZoo curriculum design project. It’s our shared aim to advocate for conservation to become a core part of the curriculum so more children and teachers can become part of creating a better future for our planet.
Since 2017 we’ve been working with Ignite TSA to inspire schools to put conservation at the heart of their curriculum, empowering pupils and teachers to act for wildlife.
A two-year-old Asian elephant at Chester Zoo has made a full recovery, experts believe, from the deadly virus threatening Asian elephants globally.