Last weekend we organized a huge park school event here in the central park of the Nanegal parrish. The park school is an extension to the forest school concept. Since we don't have chance to take all the local children (that might or might not be interested) to the forest or other more natural locations, we try to do some of the activitues in central places, such as parks or public schools.
So we setup a tent with a few tables and Santa Lucía staff was carrying out nature and research related activities with the interested audience. We played games (such as memory with images of local bird species) or did quizzes (with footage from our camera traps). We also did a few expeditions in the local park.
With a group of five local kids we did a short bird observation tour (a bird blitz?) and we discovered 10 species within 5 minutes. That was incredible.
But as always we also had a look at the less visible life forms. So we went out armed with magnifying lenses and small recipients and collected insects, spiders and other small critters. Everybody was quite surpised at how much we were able to collect.
The day before we had collected some rocks from a local river and we took the chance to present our findings to the public and tried to detect and explain the differences between the rocks that we had found.
In parallel a cycling tour took place and we received around 15 participants of the tour in our park school as well and discussed conservation issues of the region and especially the role of the CACOA (the committee of the bear's corredor) in all that.
For us this park school event, which also offered a little market where local producers could sell their products, was a huge success (the weather also kindly played along and it did not rain during the day) and we are planning to repeat it maybe bi-monthly.
