Zoo Education Centres

Zoos are sensory places. Students, teachers and parents can see them, sense them and then have the skills to save them.

When you visit the zoos you hear, see and smell wildlife. In the zoo classroom, students can encounter live animals face to face. Trained teachers at the zoos can offer students a wildly different learning experience, one that can act as a stimulus for further learning.

Zoo educators at Taronga and Western Plains Zoos address environmental education across the curriculum through a variety of stimulating educational programs. Zoo education supports schools by designing the zoo excursion or zoo lesson around the specific needs of each school. The zoos also provide written resources to support learning, such as specific zoo kits for each of the key learning areas, as well as general information kits and zoo-based fact sheets for assistance with school projects.

Zoo lessons allow students to get up close and personal with live animals. The zoo education centres house a variety of mammals, birds, reptiles, frogs and insects that form the basis of all lessons offered.

Besides lessons and zoo excursions, your zoo education centres offer special programs. These programs target specific outcomes and are aimed at specific key learning areas, such as Creative Arts or Technology, or at mandatory policies such as Literacy, Aboriginal Education an Vocational Education. While all zoo education programs support objectives of environmental education, the programs that best relate to, and assist in, the achievement outcomes in Board syllabuses are:

• Frog Focus Botany This is a community conservation education program to release and monitor the endangered Green and Golden Bell Frog. This is the first time in Australia that school students have been involved in the recovery of an endangered frog. This model could be applied to any species.
  
  
• ASX Frog Focus This national education program is an interactive CD-ROM that gives teachers a wholistic approach to studying frogs with their students. The CD-ROM has activities, curriculum links for each of the different States, in-depth information about frogs and details about how we can all be involved in frog conservation. ASX Frog Focus is available from Taronga Zoo Education Centre.
  
  
• ZooSnooz Students can sleep at the zoo and take a zoo visit to new heights! Students see the zoo at night, sleep in the zoo classrooms, meet live animals up close, go behind the scenes and assist the zoos in saving endangered species. This program is available at both Western Plains Zoo and Taronga Zoo.

 Taronga's outreach program, the Zoomobile, offers two programs to schools unable to visit the zoos for financial, cultural, health or distance reasons. The Zoomobile officer takes live animals to your school to complement your classroom activities across all key learning areas from K-12. The Animals of the Dreaming program combines interesting aspects of Australia, native animals and Dreaming stories presented by an Aboriginal elder.

All zoo educators in New South Wales are qualified teachers and are employed by the Department of Education and Training, the Catholic Education Office or the Zoological Parks Board of NSW.

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