In order to raise awareness about marine conservation the Thailand Expedition team connected with Andersons Primary School in Forres, and St. Clare's Primary School here in Glasgow. Visiting the schools gave the team members the opportunity to interact with children in the hope to inspire the future generation.
Upon arriving to the schools, we gave a short presentation about marine plastics, including what plastics were, as well as highlighting the magnitude of the problem in an easy-to-understand way.
Did you know that if the plastics that humans made every year was weighed, it would be the equivalent of 30 millions elephants?
After the presentation, the children took part in a poster designing competition, with the small prize of a snorkel set for the best poster! Each of the kids got straight to work using crayons, gel pens, coloured pencils and pens to create their masterpieces. Some of the kids even made plans of their posters before starting on their final piece. We were really impressed with the quality of all the posters and the creativity of the children in designing them. Have a click through the gallery below to see some of our favourites!
After the posters were designed and the winner announced, we gave a second presentation on the life of a marine biologist. We also spoke a bit about the Thailand Expedition and the research that we will be carrying out while we're there.
To finish the day, we split the children up into groups and had three mini stations. At the first station the children learnt all about basic dive gear, and even got to try some of the equipment on! The second dive station taught the children about basic dive signals, including how to communicate with your buddy and how to point out various marine life. At the last station we introduced the concept of fishing regulations and Marine Protected Areas through playing a game with paper fish. As expected there was lots of overexcitement and paper fish flying all over the classroom!
The team had a really fantastic time over these two activity days working with the children from the two schools. We were particularly impressed with the level of knowledge that the kids already had, as well as, the amount of curious questions that the team received. We really hope that everyone had a good time, and hopefully we have inspired some young faces to find out more about marine biology and conservation in the future!
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