Workshops
AHLS member, June Venn, assisted workshop co-ordinator, Liz Breetzke, with the running of Prof Rob O'Donoghue's Bug Busters workshop and gave us the following input:
This workshop was very hands-on, educational and family friendly. Prof O'Donoghue had everyone participating and managed to partner those children who were unaccompanied by an adult. He spoke on how compost contains a host of "bugs" varying in size, some of which are good and others bad. He explained the benefit of having a compost heap and how to manage them without attracting rats. The participants were then broken up into family groups, and given a sheet of white paper on which was a mound of compost. The task was to search for a living insect, suck it up using a straw and then deposit it into a special little glass tube. The bugs were then identified using his "bug identikit" and a special Kodak magnifying glass. The goal was to see how many different kinds of bugs we could find. There were excited squeals and laughter as children of all ages embarked on this project. I loved how we were taught to recycle the magnifying glass using a plastic soft drink top, and make sucking tubes using drinking straws!