Holy Cross Anglican School

The infant and middle school had so much fun this week when Amalia and her friend Emily from Nature Explorers International came to teach.

Nature Explores is a one week nature education week designed to introduce children to the natural world and through interest and excitement. You can find out more about them here.

Day one kicked off with with seeds, where the humble bean took center stage. Most of our kids eat beans every day of their life, but for the first time many realized there were actually baby bean plants inside.

Day two was invertebrates, with spiders, butterflies and starfish. Once again the kids simply loved doing the craft projects and many a butterfly and starfish was presented for inspection on the way home from school and seen all around town. There was a spider in a jar to be inspected with great interested and several kids came back the next day talking excitedly about the spiders they had seen at home. Even I was seeing more spiders than usual that day!


Day three was vertebrates and focused on sea turtles. Here children studied the "Sea Turtle Wheel of Trouble" and learned about the various threats sea turtles faced. They read a story about a sea turtle that felt sick after eating a plastic bag and many children said they would stop throwing bags in the water and tell their friends to stop too (a real issue here).

Day four looked at birds and included a field trip to the nearby swamp to observe the behaviors of birds - feeding, flying, flocking, preening and I cannot remember the rest. This time of year we see many migrating birds so the students had a lot to look at. Even pigeons on a roof top were suddenly transformed to fascinatingly interesting and drew shouts of excitement.

The last day was mammals and the students had a lot of fun learning all about monkeys and their important role in spreading seeds as well as making fun monkey masks. Kids had so much fun with the art and craft and talked about the masks all day. Some of the local kids not in school even followed Amalia and Emily home to ask to make masks!

The teachers also had a wonderful week with the guest teachers in the classroom. All enjoyed learning more about nature themselves and several even said they were inspired by the teaching techniques and look forward to incorporating them into their classrooms in the future.

So a huge thank you to Nature Explorers for including Holy Cross Anglican School on your schedule. We wish you all the best for the rest of your time in Belize. If you'd like to see more photos, you can find them here, with more stories here.

Know someone who does something similar - get them in touch with Holy Cross School!