Introduction

We provide environmentally focussed education activities for all year levels, P-12. Our approach is learning through immersion in the environment, hands on involvement and activity based as much as possible.
Excursions are tailored to individual school requests as required.
Our most popular excursion is an introduction to the intertidal environment and the animals living there, with a series of rock pool based activities that allow students to discover what lives in rock pools and learn a little about their lifecycle, adaptations to the environment they live and the very special nature of the Victorian coastline.
We also run dinosaur discovery excursions, learning about the distribution of dinosaurs in Australia, local dinosaurs and their significance, how fossils are formed and how scientists use fossil evidence to help reconstruct past environments. There are a number of hands on activities that demonstrate these principles.
For senior year levels we conduct more detailed excursions, focussing on the local coastline, development pressures, environmental change and its impact, changes in land use pre and post European settlement.
We can cater for groups of up to 150 students at a time although smaller groups allows more time at each activity.

Sample programs:
Introduction to the marine environment:

Arrive & introducton talk ( 5-10 mins about safety etc)
Split into a series of groups depending on numbers and teacher requests, and run through a series of activities:
Each activity needs to run for at least 20 mins to be effective, the number of activities depends on the size of the group.

Rock pooling: hands on where children explore the rock pools, find animals and ask questions about what they have found and how it lives, who it eats and so on. Find out which weird beast are more closely related to each other, how they adapt, who or what they eat.

Boulder investigation: In small groups, and with a guide sheet students spend time focussing on the individual rocks, looking at who lives under a single rock and how they survive. This allows students more time on the rock platform learning and exploring.

Environmental sandcastles; Building sand castles is fabulous for team work, co-ordination and just fun! Here the focus is on building a sand castle/sculpture with a marine theme- choose a marine animal, eg whale, sea star, octopus and build a sculpture of it and its habitat – what it might eat, where it might live.

Beach Bingo: Laminated sheets are provided with a list of things found on the beach, some easy and some difficult, some defined, eg boat, and some open ended, eg something round.  Encourages exploration of the beach as part of the environment and is more active and energetic to let off steam for the busy students in your classes.

Colour chips: to encourage detailed observation and appreciation of the environment children are given a colour chip (coloured small piece of cardboard) and encouraged to find something in the environment that is exactly that colour. In this activity accuracy encourages more detailed observation of the colours in the environment that we take for granted – the sand is not just yellow but made of pale and dark particles, the rocks are not just brown but tan and dark and red and grey.

For larger school groups these activities will fill a day excursion.  There is a fabulous shell museum at the Bunurong Environment centre which may be included in you re excursion, as an extra, if time permits or instead of one or more other activities if you prefer. The museum introduces the children to the concept of museums as active places to learn information and displays some of the amazing marine diversity found in Australian and world oceans.

Another option that can be added in here is a chance to go netting in the seagrass, either on the foreshore or at nearby Screw Creek. This activity highlights the importance of seagrass areas in the marine environment and provides a great contrast to the rock pool environment with which children are often more familiar. In conjunction with rock pooling this highlights local coastal diversity.