CCFC’s newest educational resource is proving itself in the field this week with students of Kids & Birds program. With these hand bird guides students can identify birds in the field and access their common names in Q’eqchi’, English and the scientific name.
Kids & Birds students from Chacalte Chichen learning about aquatic life in the Mestela’ river at CCFC.
For students that have already taken part in CCFC’s Kids & Birds basic curriculum, CCFC has developed a one day workshop on water, the role of forests in the water cycle and the importance of forest conservation for birds, water and people.
CCFC has a new bird guide for primary school students. Norma and Gloria Caal Bac present this wonderful bird guide to the students of Mestela school. Norma, a 12th grade teaching student, is doing her student teaching at Mestela school this year. Gloria is a CCFC Kids & Birds instructor.
In 2019 all participating Kids & Birds schools will receive a laminated trifold field guide for their class room. These field guides include local birds that students will recognize from their backyards and surrounding forests. The guide includes common names in Q’eqchi’ Maya where possible. The trifolds will be used by students inside and outside the class room before, during and after their time at CCFC.
The San Lucas Sequila primary and the two primary schools of Sequila all got a warbler coloring book last week. This year, 2018, CCFC will give 1,200 warbler coloring books to the students that visit CCFC for Kids & Birds.
Kids & Birds Team for 2018 with Rudy Botzoc. Each member of the entire Kids & Birds team is an alumnae of CCFC’s WALC program. And all of them (with the exception of Josefina) are currently enrolled in either high school or university. Josefina is taking a gap year between high school and university and is the only team member to cover the work on Fridays.
As we look toward 2018, we are especially excited about the Kids & Birds program. Schools will start arriving the last week of January. Our goal for 2018 is to have 1,200 sixth graders from January to September of 2018.
We need your help. Please contribute to Kids & Birds 2018 and help us reach our goal of having 1,200 students.
Click here to contribute to Kids & Birds
Photo © Dr. Dawn Bowen
Photo © Dr. Dawn Bowen
As an addition to our tool chest in Artful Eyes, CCFC is pleased to announce that before October 25th, we will be printing a coloring book of migratory birds. CCFC’s artist in residence, Savannah Aldrich, has been hard at work preparing a nine page coloring book of wood warblers. The species selected in this coloring book are all species that either winter in Guatemala’s central highlands or spend a significant time here in fall or spring as a migration stop over.
This beautiful coloring book will be both didactic and fun. Students will learn a lot about warblers and their plumage and they will get a chance to produce something beautiful. The book will serve both as a coloring book for kids and as a template for CCFC’s WALC participants to do embroidery of the representations of these beautiful birds.
(photo: Savannah Aldrich, Artist in Residence, behind her, a print of Keith Hansen’s “One Hundred And One Migratory Birds,” commissioned by the US Fish and Wildlife Foundation.)
CCFC thanks Artist in Residence, Savannah Aldrich, for her amazing work. Her gifts and talents in art will be multiplied by the number of schools, students, WALC participants and others that will use her coloring book.
