By Marina, Yasmin and the Iracambi team | Iracambi educators
Hello, dear donors!
I hope you continue safe and well? Please take care of yourselves – the world needs good people!
And before we start, here's a headsup. It's just two weeks to Giving Tuesday and this year GlobalGiving has a million dollars in matching funds to stretch your donation! So please alert your friends, colleagues and rich uncles to donate to Iracambi and let's make this the best Giving Tuesday ever, OK?
And now for the inside scoop on what's been happening in environmental education at Iracambi since we last wrote. Exciting news - today is the day we launch our online environmental leadership course, hooray, hooray! We'll tell you more about it in our next letter. (Just a quick hint, we have seventy people signed up, and this week we’ll be giving an introduction to Iracambi, talking a little bit about our work in the rainforest, and then tackling one of the big elephants in the room: climate change!)
But before we report back on that, we wanted to give you a quick look at another of the online science classes that we've been sending out to local schoolkids during this time of lockdown. And the feedback has been super positive.
This one is about Ecosystems. See how you get on with it!
We start by explaining about the ecosystem. It consists of living and non-living elements, right? So, how do we define living organisms? (We'll introduce the terms biotic and abiotic later on.)
* They have a life cycle – they are born and they die.
* They interact and collaborate among themselves. (Yuval Harari, author of Homo Sapiens, points out that this is one of the characteristics that has enabled humans to survive.)
* And lastly, they depend not only on other living organisms, but also on non-living elements.
And then we gave examples of living organisms: humans, horses, sloths, armadillos, chickens, as well as plants: trees, bananas, and palm trees.
After that, we talked about non-living elements and explained the differences.
They don’t have a life cycle, they don’t interact and collaborate among themselves, and they exist independently. Examples we gave are water, air, rocks and soil. We showed some pictures and asked the children to divide them up into living organisms and non-living elements. And then we asked if they knew that we live in the Atlantic Rainforest – one of the richest ecosystems in the world! We asked them to color in the living organisms and mark an X against the non-living elements in the picture.
It was a fun lesson, and the kids really enjoyed it! And in our next letter we'll report back on our online course, OK?
In the meantime please stay safe, and thank you for supporting us as we support the EcoLeaders who will be the future guardians of the planet!
With love from Marina, Yasmin and the Iracambi team
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