Today it was International Day for Biological Diversity, and the theme this year is “Our Biodiversity, Our Food, Our Health”, focusing our attention on health, food and our natural environment.
This was the theme at our Book Club Hour at Thorntree Preparatory School today.
The children learned about
- what biodiversity is
- how plants and animals support each other in the food chain or food web
- human-caused species loss as one of the major current threats to biodiversity
- how the disappearance of one species affects other species
- why it is important to think about where our food comes from
- how to look after nature and why
- that it is important to have diversity in the world
We discussed living things, producers, consumers, food chains and webs, how to keep nature healthy and the effect on us (humans) if we don’t, and what we can do to help our biodiversity.
We also read the thought-provoking book Lots by award-winning children’s author and zoologist Nicola Davies (ISBN: 9781406378894), which is another beautifully illustrated non-fiction picture book by the author that introduces living things everywhere to the reader – a brilliant introduction to the concept of biodiversity to young readers.
The children then worked together to build a food-web with picture cards and discussed what would happen if any one (or more) of the living things ceased to exist.
Each child also received an International Day for Biological Diversity bookmark
