Display rooms

The Council has some excellent facilities available for classes as part of its environmental education programme.

Visits usually emcompass one or more of the following. The length of each session depends on the age of the students and what aspects of the environmental education programme need to be covered.

Display Room

Two PowerPoint presentations are available, depending on the age of the children. Both cover the role the Council plays in ensuring the quality of our region’s environment is both maintained and improved. This includes issues such as resource consents, the quality of both fresh and sea water, air, and land.

Located on the walls of the display room and the adjacent biolaboratory are a series of colourful, attractive and informative charts all of which cover environmental issues. In close proximity to each chart is a series of questions the answers to which are found within the text or the accompanying photographs.

The questions range in difficulty from basic information gathering to the more demanding inferential types. Teachers would be expected to choose which series is best suited to the range of abilities within the class.

Biolaboratory

The Education Officer delivers a 15-20 minute talk which covers:

• The life cycle of some of our fresh water fish from spawning to death and how they make their journeys at the start and end of their lives with or without human intervention.
• How the Taranaki Regional Council uses samplings of aquatic invertebrates found in our rivers as part of our assessment of water quality.
• How the introduced fish species have impacted on other native species and in our life styles.

The students then have the opportunity of observing at close quarters a good range of freshwater fish in our aquariums.

Pest management

A Pest Management Officer delivers an entertaining and action-packed address which covers how and why some of our animal pests arrived here, why they have thrived and methods of control. An exciting array of traps is demonstrated.

Contact Kevin Archer, Environmental Education Officer, for any of these resources.

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