Last week was National Bird Week 2021, from Monday 18 October and Sunday 24 October. The celebration of National Bird Week has its origins back in the early 1900s when 28 October was first designated by the Royal Australasian Ornithologists Union, as the first ‘Bird...
We all know that 2020 and 2021 have not been normal years. Even though there have been normal times, the shadow of the pandemic has never been far away. Keeping people safe has meant limiting physical contact and close proximity to others. When your whole...
If you’ve been watching the news or live locally, you would know that Armidale was recently hit by a very dangerous tornado. The massive storm that spawned the tornado occurred just after 10pm on Thursday 14 October. We were relieved to learn that no one...
Have you ventured into any national parks lately and come face-to-face with a beautiful waratah, aka Telopea? This stunning flower is out in full force in our local Washpool-Gibralter National Park not far from Glen Innes, NSW....
As a drama teacher, I witnessed first-hand the benefits of experiential learning. Students learned by doing. Even at senior level, we would often dive into dramatic play before the students were made aware of the learning objective. Their felt experience informed their intellectual understanding and...
Have you heard about nature journalling? My daughter and I recently discovered this lovely practice of wandering out in nature and taking notes and making sketches of the things we see. For us, this was something that we could do in our backyard...
In our UNE Discovery Voyager activity Plants, Poop and Pollinators, we play a role-playing game where students become busy dung beetles, rolling away balls of manure and ‘burying’ them in their underground dung beetle nests. The dung beetles (students) must roll away as many balls...
For many people, 3D printing is a fantastic, almost science fiction type of futuristic technology hidden out of reach in engineering labs and TV prop studios. But what if it wasn’t? What if it was available to you, right now? 3D printing is becoming increasingly...
While we’ve not been able to travel about the region or further afield for several months now, you may have seen one of our non-human team members out and about. Suzi, the UNE Discovery Voyager truck, has taken on a very important role during lockdown...
You might remember earlier this year we announced that we’d been successful in securing a Federal Government grant through Inspiring Australia, and in partnership with Armidale City Public School, Armidale Regional Council and Settlement Services International (phew! That was a mouthful!)....
