Suffolk Owl Sanctuary has had a busy few weeks at the end of the school term, as teachers were keen to give their pupils something good to remember from a disrupted academic year. Our Education team worked hard to ensure that each group had a tailored itinerary, allowing time for lunch and the play areas between our popular flying displays and meerkat talks, as well as educational sessions.
All young visitors received our Safari Trail booklet, with plenty of activities to keep them occupied throughout the day.
With delays to the government lifting restrictions, we were unable to relax our maximum group size for on site visits. However, between April and the middle of July we welcomed 11 educational groups to the Sanctuary, and delivered learning opportunities for over 300 young people. Most groups booked a Guided Walk with our Education team, which allows them to find out a bit more about selected birds and ask us any questions they might have. The most popular workshop for on-site visits was Minibeast Madness, which we look forward to running again next term with our new Invertebrate inhabitants.
Susan with Goliath, just one of our Madagascan Hissing Cockroaches who helps educate young and old about how important Invertebrates are, and introduces them to the Clean Up Crew!
Although we were only able to visit 6 schools and groups offsite this term, these visits allowed us to reach over 750 young people! We’ve enjoyed our visits to deliver Storytime with Auckland, fun sessions on Habitats and Food Chains and our very popular Pellet Detectives.
The young people at The Hive enjoyed our Pellet Detectives session, where they discovered what sorts of things owls eat by studying the bones they found.
Our Virtual Sessions have proven to be very popular! Since January we have delivered Virtual Sessions to over 1000 people from 24 different groups, including schools, youth and community groups. These sessions have been particularly popular with youth groups who have moved their programme online, and as a result, we have spoken to a range of groups from near and far – a cluster of bookings in Oxfordshire and two bookings for a Virtual Sleepover in Oman! Even though restrictions will be lifting in the near future, we will continue to offer our Virtual Sessions and hope to continue to reach new audiences.
Education Officer Susan, supervised by Shimba, getting ready for an online Pellet Detectives session.
We have had some excellent feedback on our Educational offering already, and to encourage more groups to complete our Feedback Forms, we have a Prize Draw to win a FREE Virtual Session for your class or group every term. You should receive this shortly after your visit or session, but if you require it again, please contact Susan on susan@owlbarn.co.uk to have it resent.
The Y6s of Bardwell Primary School visited us as part of their action-packed Staycation recently and had a fun afternoon learning more about our birds and animals. Bardwell Primary prides itself on its outdoor learning provision and it certainly showed in this group's response to the animals here. The children were already very knowledgeable about where our animals live in the wild and what they eat, and had a clear interest in our rescue work too.
Bookings for the Autumn term will be open over the summer holidays, and we look forward to continuing to inspire young people to care about the natural world.