The first touch to conservation education

by Jessica (Education Staff)

I was a teacher before I start to work in BNF. My biggest passion is to bring environmental awareness to all of my students. This is because nowadays children live very far from the nature and they only have few opportunities of coming into intimate contact with the nature, or having any direct experience of seeing how beautiful it is to walk daily to breathe pure air and enjoy the beauty of nature. Their knowledge about nature is really minimum. As the world becomes more populated, and the existence of some animals and plants life becomes endangered and extinct, the role that all of them play in protecting or destroying the earth can be reinforced.

“…nowadays children live very far from the nature and they only have few opportunities of coming into intimate contact with the nature, or having any direct experience of seeing how beautiful it is to walk daily to breathe pure air and enjoy the beauty of nature”

The first time I started working with BNF, I am so impressed by the way BNF tries to pack nature and education into one conservation class to teach children many important concepts, such as the beauty of nature, respect, caring for the forest, and the interrelationships among humans and the habitat. For instance, in conservation class, children can learn how they could affect the environment as well as how the environment affects them. In the end of the conservation class, the team will take the children to the forest. This is an eye-opening approach as we somehow indirectly create the circumstances for children to connect directly with the nature. Due to the habit of modern children nowadays that have less opportunity to enjoy nature, they tend to play indoor games or spend most of their times on the computer screen, that is why we need to bring these children outside to do something interesting in the nature and its natural environment.

Children need to go to the nature to study flora, fauna, and ecosystems and into the to observe environmental problems, like pollution, wildfire, deforestation, and conservation processes. Conservation class gives well-conceived interpretive facilities with basic environmental information that should be cariied out in natural areas setting to encourage children identify plants and animals and learn about their characteristics and their connections.

BNF’s Education Team attempt to build love and curiosity of nature to the children, therefore children would be fully aware of the nature environment and the necessity to really try to save the planet and be motivated to take action to nature conservation. By this approach, it helps the children to stir the excitement about nature and emphasize their responsibility to respect its worth and value as well as try to maintain its natural shape. In doing this through direct interaction for children to experience and explore nature, the aim is hopefully, the children can begin to value and appreciate their immediate world and will generalize this knowledge to other situations and places.