Marine Education at the Orphanage

We spent an afternoon visiting an orphanage last week and had the opportunity to play with the kids and teach them about the importance of a clean ocean.  Before our visit to the orphanage, we created an ocean scene (who knew we were so crafty?!), foam glitter sea creatures, mock trash, paper whale sharks and our greatest accomplishment, the whale shark piñata!

Robyn hard at work glittering our piñata.

When we arrived at the orphanage, we started teaching the children how large whale sharks are and laid a tape measure across the floor so the children could see the size of some of the sharks in La Paz. We then showed the children our ocean scene and Manolo explained that they could each take a handful of items (marine animals or trash) from a bucket and decide themselves where to put it either in the ocean or in the trash.  The goal was to have the children identify which items didn't belong in the sea and they did a fantastic job at decorating our "ocean" and getting rid of all the unwanted trash!  Manolo did most of the talking as we all need to work on our Spanish skills ("Hola, Si! muy bien, Gracias hahaha).

We also made paper whale sharks for them to decorate.  Most of them ended up with blue spots but a few were lucky enough to be coloured orange, red and purple or any other colour and design the inventive children wanted.  Each one was definitely unique!
We also brought a ridiculous amount of glitter to the orphanage and they will probably be cleaning it up for the next year. Our apologies for that!
We sweep the floors in the house almost daily and we are still finding bits of glitter :)

Our final activity of the day was to break open the whale shark piñata that we made earlier in the week!  We lined up the kids in the courtyard and learned a traditional Mexican piñata song while the kids took turns trying to bring down the piñata.  Once he finally exploded, candy flew everywhere and the kids rushed to gather up the sweets.    We hung out for a bit longer playing with the kids and then it was the end of our day.

The kids and caretakers at the orphanage were great and we really enjoyed our visit to their home. We are hoping to do more activities with the orphanage soon! Watch this space..
-Nicole (current intern)