Before the end of the school year, we visited the Alojz Gradnik Primary School in Colo (Repen), Italy, where we organised a botany workshop for pupils from 1st to 5th grade.
We walked through a beautiful flowering pasture near the school. The pupils learnt about the typical plants of the dry karst grasslands. Among them, some of them used to heal people and animals. They learned that flowers have beautiful, vivid colours to attract pollinators and the colour of the flower determines which insect will pollinate the plant.
At the end each pupil drew one or more of the plants that stood out in their minds on a worksheet and wrote its name next to it. In this way, the pupils created their own karst meadow to decorate their classrooms.
In the winter, we also for the italian pupils organised a workshop, where we made wooden nest boxes, bird feeders and insect hotels. The pupils learnt about the different bird species typical of the Karst, their feeding habits, reproduction and nesting. We also discussed what threatens birds in the Karst and how we can help them ourselves.
