On Monday, March 14th, we visited the bilingual “John M. Carras” Kindergarten of the Athens College, to tell the Healthy Seas story to 120 five-year-olds!
We provided plenty of sensory opportunities to get the kids excited by being able to touch and feel samples of sustainable products made by our partners, with ECONYL® regenerated nylon. During the ever popular “Meet the Diver” segment, our volunteer Maria, presented the real life equipment that ghost divers need to remove ghost nets and save entangled animals. Maria also showed the basic hand signals for underwater communication. The kids were then able to turn this newly acquired knowledge into practice when the time came to become little divers themselves, working with their diving buddies to help release toy sea animals from colorful gillnets.
Thanks to everyone’s determination we succeeded in implementing the programme despite the storm “Filippos”. The school’s administration was brilliant in finding a solution and adapting their weekly schedule to find a new date to host us! We were honored and really felt at home in this beautiful school.
The kidergarden is housed in a bioclimatic design building, the first Platinum LEED building in Greece! It is built in a fish shape with its head faced towards the entrance, a fountain with a beautiful dolphin is the fish eye, its backbone is the kindergarten’s corridor to the classrooms and its tail hosts the multi-use rooms for the students.
Each classroom is named after a sea creature: dolphin, starfish, seabass, clam, mullet, seahorse, swordfish, crab, sea bream, coral, and seashell which were depicted by the renowned and recently deceased Greek painter, Alekos Fasianos.
A special thanks to our volunteer Maria Rapti, Ghost Diving Greece for loaning the diving gear, and Vasilis Kyriakis for helping the facilitation of this programme.
