Daniel Watler and Kenya McDermot present Lois Blumenthal and Tansy Maki with a cheque for CI$600 that was raised during a project with radio station HOT 104.1 FM to create a radio commercial for the protection of Cayman’s wild birds.
Year 6 students from St Ignatius School entering this year’s Disney Cruise Line’s ‘Jiminy Cricket’s Environmentality Challenge,’ have undertaken several environmentally-conscious projects under the guidance of their Social Studies teacher, Maria Kennedy.
“We’ve been looking at ways we can help the environment and the children have decided to focus on wildlife,” Ms Kennedy said.
The students have been involved with helping the environment in several different ways.
One of them is to build a special butterfly-friendly garden at the back of their school.
The plants in the garden have been selected to attract butterflies and the garden is also being finished in the traditional Cayman way, by using a covering of sand.
Another part of the students’ project has been the creation of a radio commercial highlighting the importance of protecting wild birds and their habitat.
Ms Kennedy explained:
“Radio station Hot 104.1 FM helped us to create the radio commercial and the children wrote a commercial with the help of Steve Jones, one of the radio station’s managers,” she said.
“The students put together the commercial about four weeks before Christmas and the commercial aired during the Christmas Break.”
The message of the commercial was also to ask people to stop chopping down trees because the Cayman Parrott is losing its habitat, and it also contained the injured bird emergency helpline, ‘917-BIRD,’ so that members of the public would know what to do if they found an injured wild animal.
“We asked local businesses to sponsor the commercial, but dms Broadcasting gave all the money back, so that basically they did it (ran the commercial) for free,” Ms Kennedy said.
“The money was raised so that the Wildlife Rescue Society could continue to rescue animals, because it costs a lot of money to feed animals and pay for their vet bills,” Ms Kennedy said.
On Monday 8 January, at a school assembly, two of the Year 6 school students, Kenya McDermot and Daniel Watler, presented a check for CI $600, the money raised from the sponsorship of the commercial, to Lois Blumenthal and Tansy Maki from the National Trust Wildlife Rescue Programme.
Tansy Maki will also be helping the students to paint a large wildlife mural, depicting many different indigenous Cayman animals, onto part of the school wall.
