As part of Crawford Pre-Primary School’s values programme for the school’s second term, they recently implemented a two-week Animal Responsibility programme.
Pupils between the ages of three to six were educated about respect for pets and animals, pet hygiene, going to the vet, responsibilities and cleaning up after pets, feeding and health, kindness and love towards pets and animals and general care.
With the topics learnt, the teachers encouraged the pupils to donate and collect needed items for animal shelters.
The school invited three animal shelters to participate in the programme as each shelter provided a wish list of items and each grade was allocated a shelter. Grade 000 was responsible for Dogtown – Barking Mad; Grade 00 was responsible for Kitty and Puppy Haven; and Grade R was responsible for Ark Animal Centre.
During the first week of the programme, the school implemented a fun puppet show using tales to educate children on animal responsibility. “The puppet show was a lovely way to kick-start the values programme for our small children. We strongly believe in educating through play – accidental learning through play is what we aim to achieve,” said principal Roslyn Truelock.
Grade 000 teacher, Kyla Moi Kin, added that although most schools only start educating their children on animal responsibility in the later grades, they felt it was important to start educating them as early as possible as it will help to prevent problems like unwanted pets.
Representatives of the animal shelters were then invited to join the school’s assembly for a handover of collected items, and each shelter brought animals from their organisation and gave a short talk to the children.
The two-week programme resulted in raising a total of R10 770 which was collected from cash donations, sales of raffles and merchandise. An estimated total value of about R80 000 of the wish-list items was collected for the shelters from the generous pupils and parents of the school.
Details: 011 465 4484.
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