Presentations at Carnarvon schools

Hey GTCP followers,

Wow has this week been action packed! After starting essential pre-season work at Gnaraloo, we took a road trip back to Carnarvon to do 3 presentations at 2 schools! The momentum of this early success bodes well for a successful community outreach program this season.

Prior to all the presentations, the Turtle crew including Karen met with the principals and several teachers to explain what Gnaraloo is and what we, the Gnaraloo Turtle Conservation Program, are trying to achieve with our presentations.  We also extended the offer to allow students to participate with the research at Gnaraloo.  We really hope schools come to Gnaraloo for field excursions to observe our work — this is one of our big goals for this year’s community outreach program and we’re very happy to be laying the groundwork for it already.

Our first 2 presentations took place at St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic School in Carnarvon, where we gave the GTCP’s first ever primary school presentation! The first group at St. Mary’s consisted of 25 – 30 year nine and ten students (14 – 15 years old), but it was the second group of students that really surprised us. Our audience consisted of a whopping 75 – 85 year four, five, and six students (8 – 10 years old), and the high level of interest and intelligent questions coming from all of the students was both surprising and exciting. We had especially prepared the second talk to cater to very young audiences, based on the movie Nemo which you may remember from a few years ago, in order to hold their interest. If we had any doubts before, this presentation confirmed that starting primary school presentations was a good idea and should continue in the future.

Our last presentation took place at Carnarvon Primary School in front of 10 – 13 year old kids with the group consisting of 25 – 30 students. Since we had only just begun targeting the younger students, we weren’t sure if the first group had been particularly clued in on turtles already, but sure enough the third presentation was filled with just as many questions and an impressive amount of prior turtle knowledge!

Overall, we feel the presentations were a great success and can’t wait for the next round of ‘turtley awesome’ presentations, kicking off again on 11 November at other primary and high schools in Carnarvon.

The GTCP turtle team would like to thank both St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic School and Carnarvon Primary School for allowing us to come and show you why turtle conservation is so important. We hope you enjoyed the presentations as much we enjoyed giving them and we look forward to future encounters.

And remember….. STOP! DROP! AND BECOME A ROCK!!

Fiona