Rosario Playcare’s Visit to Clandeboye
Further to the success of the Northern Ireland Tree Campaign’s Environmental Adventure at Scrabo Country Park on Sunday 5th June to celebrate World Environment Day, our team set about refining the games put together to allow us to take this great event to as many children as possible across Northern Ireland.
We set about designing a wider range of activities to give the Environmental Adventure more flexibility and allow it to be adapted to different locations. After many long hours in our workshop sawing, assembling, sanding and painting, a new slicker version of the Environmental Adventure emerged. To test drive our new games we invited local summer schemes to come along to Clandeboye Estate and put our Adventure to the test.
On 17th August, Rosario Playcare based in Belfast, rose to the challenge and paid us a visit in Bangor. We set off along our nature trail, stopping a various points along the way to take part in environmental activities.
The first stop was a woodland mini-beast hunt. Among the finds were woodlice, centipedes, millipedes, slugs, beetles and caterpillars. Further along the nature walk the children had to keep their eyes peeled for all sorts of unusual items littering the way, as they took part in the ‘Un-natural, Nature Walk’. Twenty objects were hidden high and low. As the children walked along they had to find and memorise the items that shouldn’t be there.
One of the most popular activities the children participated in was Colour Dabs. As we walked along, tiny pieces of colour from leaves, petals and seeds were collected and stuck onto a card with double-sided sticky tape. At the end, each child had created a beautiful natural mosaic, which could then be pressed.
The final task was a chance for the kids to express their artistic talents by creating Tree Faces. All the raw materials such as fallen twigs, leaves and seeds etc. for their masterpieces were collected from the woodland floor. Then all that was needed was the secret ingredient. mud! Buckets filled with soil were mixed with water, by lots of eager, mucky hands. Dollops of mud were then stuck to different trees, moulded and decorated. The results were remarkable. The trees really looked as if they had faces. Some had glasses, earrings, hats, necklaces, some were cats and one tree had the face of a horse! Everyone really enjoyed themselves, so much so that the group made arrangements to return to Clandeboye Estate later in the year to take part in another Environmental Adventure.