Little Tern at Gronant

Client
Denbighshire Countryside Services (part of Denbighshire County Council)

Challenge
To create lesson packs and animations about the little tern colony at Gronant, Prestatyn

Solution

The little tern is endangered and travels from Africa each year to nest in the UK. They only nest in approx. 4 areas in the North West of the UK, one of which is Gronant dunes at Prestatyn, North Wales. The dunes have the perfect shale beaches and rich sand eel food source for them to be able to breed, however, predation and people are causing problems, and the conservation team do a lot of work to keep them safe and ensure the chicks survive.

We were approached by Denbighshire Countryside Services to work with them on creating a suite of learning materials about the little terns at Gronant, Prestatyn to help spread the word of the conservation efforts of the team and educate people about the amazing, rare birds that breed there. This is just the kind of thing we love to do, so we worked alongside DCS and our old friends at Splinter, to create three lesson plan packs focusing on breeding, predation and conservation.

Rachael spent time researching and writing the lessons with the DCS team, to be suitable for both the Welsh and English Key Stage 2 curriculums, and to include as many subjects as we could – from Maths to Art.

In the meantime, Splinter, created the animations based on illustrations by our lovely friend Ste illustrates. Taking the look and feel from his illustrations enabled Sarah to create the teachers notes, resources and workbooks for year3 and 4 and year 5 and 6 in a complementary style.

These resources were made in Welsh and English and are able to be printed if the teacher prefers or used online and are all available for download from the little terns website at https://littleterns.denbighshirecountryside.org.uk/

We loved working on these and really hope to be able to do some more lessons for the little tern in the future.