Program Outline

The Grade Six students spend the three days learning in the Tofino Botanical Gardens’ natural settings – the gardens, the old growth temperate rainforest and the mudflats – as well as two local beaches. The kids and chaperones stay and learn in The Ecolodge, a dormitory-classroom facility located in the Gardens.

SAMPLE CAMP FORMAT
As part of Sustainability Camp, the students learn many different aspects about how humans interact with the environment and how we can improve these interactions to create a sustainable future.

The first module focuses on how important community and effective communication is to make change. These lessons are reinforced with games in the gardens, the rainforest and the mudflats adjacent to the Gardens.

In the next module, the students use the mudflats to visualize the processes involved in making fossil fuels. Later in The Ecolodge’s classroom, they learn how old these fuels are, and why it is important to conserve these.

In the third module, students learn about energy conservation, renewable energy and why it is important that we look to these energy choices. This is a recurring theme throughout the Camp, which begins as a discussion and questioning period in The Ecolodge’s classroom.

The fourth module takes the kids out to a sandy beach with an excellent rocky intertidal outcrop to learn the importance of biodiversity. As students interact with tide pools, lessons about conserving biodiversity for its own right, and how we rely on this diversity are reinforced.

During the fifth module, the students spend an afternoon at the world-famous Long Beach focusing on pollution. A Parks Canada interpreter begins the afternoon session with a slideshow about marine pollution and plastic contaminants and then the students are sent out to the beach for a “beach clean-up”. After an afternoon cleaning up the beach, the students categorize and graph the pollution, reinforcing the scope of the problem. The students’ are amazed that most of the garbage collected on the beach is a form of plastic – many lessons before and after this module talk about how this plastic was made from fossil fuels.

The last module circles back to the community module that was delivered in the beginning of the camp. Key members of the community are invited to answer questions that the students’ prepare in advance. Community members might include a Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation’s chief or council member, the town of Tofino’s mayor , the president of the Tofino-Longbeach Chamber of Commerce, a local school board member, the manager of the local grocery store and local business people.