Short before its first anniversary the Foundation for Environmental Applications and Research «Lake Baikal» won the presidential grant in the field of «Environment and animals protection» for the implementation of the project «With a Backpack on the Trail».
We are sure that exploring the environment through interaction with it in the young age solves a range of tasks: children get interested in the nature that they’ve faced not in the books or in the Internet, but in reality; children get desire to protect animals and plants and take care of nature. The idea of the project «With a backpack on the trail» was developed in cooperation with the Foundation’s partner, Interregional civil organization the Great Baikal trail. It is our colleagues from the Great Baikal trail who suggested a trip on a special trail that conserve unique Baikal nature and who articulated the local organizations’ interest in such format of lesson-trip with a backpack.
The program of the project will contain lesson-trips for 100 children. Every child will get a backpack with a necessary education toolkit and will go for a trip to a nature park on an eco-trail with an instructor. Within a gamified lesson led by an instructor with elements of team- and individual work a child will broaden and deepen his knowledge about the environment, learn to hear voices of the nature, carry out experiments with a magnifying glass, roulette, compass, weather detector, will write down observations to the workbook, learn how to navigate the map, recognize birds’ tracks, see healthy and diseased plants (in particular, damaged by humans), learn to love and cherish the world around them. At the end of the journey, the participant will receive a task to share knowledge with peers and adults.
The project’s target audience is children aged 7 to 12 years. Children from poor families, as well as children left without parental care will be invited to take part. These are vulnerable children groups who need extra attention. Lessons within the project «With a backpack on the trail» will stimulate a careful attitude towards nature in a gamified way, unite children within the process of accomplishing team tasks, and form an active life position of nature advocates. The project development implies cooperation with schools within the summer camps and an increase in the coverage of the audience to at least 500 people in three years.
The Fund’s management hopes that the project will subsequently become large-scale and will become the basis for the development of new programs and conceptions in this field aimed at stimulating education in the sphere of ecology.
The Lake Baikal Foundation expresses its gratitude for cooperation in preparing the application and working out ideas for its implementation to the partner organization the Great Baikal Trail, as well as Nina Budajapova, the volunteer of Lake Baikal Foundation. We are grateful to the Presidential Grants Fund for the trust and interest in our project!