In the last week of August, as part of the third phase of the Phoenix Fund’s “Games in defense of the tiger” project, experts from the Environmental Education Department of the Anyuisky branch of the Zapovednoye Priamurye Federal State Budgetary Institution conducted workshops for teachers, educators, and cultural workers of the Nanai district of the Khabarovsky province. The workshop was dedicated to the biological diversity of Anyuisky National Park that is the habitat of many Red Book species and common animals and plants. Interaction of man with nature is one of the most pressing problems of our time. In the Russian Far East, the Amur tiger is an indicator of the state of nature. Therefore, all of the seminar materials addressed a topic of tiger conservation to different extents. During the seminar, the students got acquainted with the teacher edition “Games in defense of the tiger” - compiled by Alexander Vrishch. The publication of this edition became possible thanks to the creative team of teachers, who worked in collaboration with the Phoenix Fund and with the financial support of the Presidential Grants Fund. The manual contains games that form the children’s interest in nature, respect and a sense of responsibility for it. The content of the edition is interdisciplinary; it integrates primary and additional education, covers environmental education issues. Games are aimed both at acquiring knowledge about nature, and at developing basic educational skills such as memory, attention, logic, information analysis.
The seminar turned out to be interesting, informative for both teachers and educators, and for employees of the Anyuisky national park. The participants managed to exchange experience in organizing events and renew partnerships. They noted that thanks to the new manual, it will be easier for them to prepare for the Tiger Day celebrations, which is held on the last Sunday of September. A few more workshops are already scheduled for early fall.
“A lot of work went into the manual on environmental games and now we are glad to see how it lives on. It’s important for us to understand the needs of teachers and provide methodological support for rare species conservation in the form that would be interesting for students, ”says Sergey Bereznyuk, Director of the Phoenix Fund. “Teachers in Primorye are already actively using environmental games from the manual, and in the new school year, colleagues from the Khabarovsk Territory will join them.”
The originals of the teacher edition are distributed free of charge and only through educational seminars. We thank the Presidential Grants Fund and the Whitley Fund for Nature for their support of the development and publication of the manual.
