We are looking for some people to help us go pond dipping with families during the school holidays and we have a role to help you start a career in outdoor education.
We are recruiting for our 2019 Learning Assistant Volunteer Internship.
Our structured programme will teach you all the skills you need to deliver outdoor learning programmes here or anywhere. You can fit it around the school run and it's fun too!
The Intern in 2018 said "it helped me to find my vocation!"
If you would like more details have a look here. The closing date is coming up so if you are interested let Jules know by emailing julie.foreman@rspb.org.uk
Pond dipping is a lot of fun! And that is why it is one of our most popular events for families!
If you would like to spend some time pond dipping and sharing your passion for enthusing children and adults alike about the natural world to run very informal & small family activity sessions for families who visit Rainham Marshes nature reserve.
If you're a parent this could be a great thing to do with your child or children you lead the session, they have fun doing the activity with other kids and families.Or equally if you fancy a bit of 'me' time then you can leave them at home with the babysitter for a couple of hours!
Pond dipping at Rainham Marshes by Jesper Mattias (rspb-images.com)
So, what do we mean by running 'activity sessions'? It's not scary, promise! It's stuff like taking kids pond dipping (we'd show you how this works beforehand if you've not done before), you could also try bit of story telling, making fat cakes for birds, showing kids how to search for minibeasts (like spiders, worms and bugs!) and a bit of fun science (very simple science experiments to do with nature - again, we'd show you how to do these beforehand)
If you're keen to give all these activities a go that's great, or if you'd prefer to just focus on your favorite activity and nothing else, eg, making fat cakes for birds or looking for minibeasts, then that's fine with us too.
We're also keen to expand the activities we already run so would welcome your ideas of what else we might try. This is all about helping families make the most of their visit, starting to build a lifelong passion for nature, and so that they'll come back again and again! We're really flexible on time commitment, whatever you can give is great and would be very welcomed. Of course we wouldn't expect you to go out of pocket either so would fully reimburse your travel expenses to and from the reserve whenever you're volunteering with us.
If you fancy some pond dipping for a few hours in the school holidays or at weekends then email louise.moss@rspb.org.uk - you can find out more about the role here.
Children discovering nature at Rainham Marshes by David McHugh (rspb-images.com)