A Christmas card fit for a Prince

The Prince of Wales’s Rainforests Project has invited nursery and primary-school-aged children to design a Christmas card to launch an educational programme on the world’s tropical rainforests.

The competition will challenge the imagination and creativity of young children everywhere and is one of a series of national curriculum-linked lessons that can be downloaded for free from The Prince’s Rainforests Project’s Schools website that was launched this week.

The Prince’s Rainforests Project will select and send out the winning entry in e-card form as the official card for Christmas 2008. The winning school will receive 200 printed cards of their design. All the entries submitted by schools will be displayed in the gallery on the website for people to e-mail to their friends.

The new Schools site is supporting the work of The Prince’s Rainforests Project which works with governments, business, NGOs and individuals to increase global recognition of the contribution of tropical deforestation to climate change and aims to find ways to make the rainforests worth more alive than dead.

Designed to appeal to children aged between three and 11 (Foundation, KS1, and KS2 levels), the national curriculum-linked course has an exciting interactive style that encourages children to learn about rainforests through a series of quests, or modules. The quests allow the children to graduate from rainforest apprentices to explorers, rangers and finally rainforest guardians as their knowledge and involvement grows.

The course has been specifically designed to allow children to learn about the full range of rainforest issues, including biodiversity, climate change, indigenous people and ecosystems, and to provide children with a number of practical experiences – from making masks and insect mobiles to recording a soundtrack of animal noises to creating posters.

The children will then present their work to others - family, friends and peers – and help them to develop an understanding of the vital importance of rainforests and the important role that the Prince's Rainforests Project is playing in helping to conserve and restore them.

Keith Egleton, an educationalist with Project Genie – the organisation responsible for co-ordinating the educational programme in partnership with The Prince’s Rainforests Project – said: “The lesson devised for this competition will encourage children to explore ideas for their cards through which they will learn about the rainforests, the animals, plants and other features that make them integral to our survival.”

Briony Mathieson, Communications Manager for The Prince’s Rainforests Project said: “In order to create the global determination needed to put forests at the heart of the climate change agenda, we need schools to play a critical role. The next generation who will inherit this problem are some of the best ambassadors for encouraging the new thinking which is required while we still have time…” 

Entries must be in by 26th November, 2008 and details are available at www.princesrainforestsproject.org/schools.

About The Prince’s Rainforests Project

The PRP consists of a team of 20 working out of St. James’s Palace who intend to leverage the convening power of The Prince of Wales to work with bodies ranging from Governments, international business and NGOs to the rainforest nations themselves and the people who depend on these forests for their livelihoods.

PRP’s objectives are to find a way to:

• Establish true economic values for the services provided by the rainforests;
• Identify possible sources of finance to pay for those services; and
• Develop efficient and equitable transfer mechanisms, alongside the necessary technical and institutional capabilities that may be required, to ensure that the funds aimed at conserving rainforests also contribute to improving local people’s long-term livelihoods.

PRP is being assisted by a Steering Group comprising business leaders from Barclays, BSkyB, Climate Exchange Plc, Deutsche Bank, Finsbury, Goldman Sachs, KPMG, McDonald’s, Man Group plc, Morgan Stanley, Rio Tinto, Shell, Sun Media Group as well as key figures from the World Bank, Coalition for Rainforest Nations and the Global Canopy programme. If you’re interested in finding out more about the PRP or to register your support to combat climate change through halting deforestation, please log-on to: www.princesrainforestsproject.org

About Project Genie

Project Genie is an education-based programme focusing on climate change and sustainability that provides a range of teaching ideas, materials and support for primary children and teachers. The programme was set up by Prof Hugh Montgomery, Director, of the UCL Institute for Human Health & Performance, in 2007 to inspire and motivate children and their families to take action against climate change. It promotes a free education-based programme focusing on climate change and sustainability, which provides a range of teaching ideas and materials for school children. For more information, please visit: http://www.btbetterworld.com/genie/

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