On Sunday 10th June, the Emanuel School Animal Club hired a bus and went to visit the , an animal sanctuary in Calga, on the Central Coast.  AWWP is a very special park in NSW where you can see both Australian wildlife and ancient Aboriginal sites. The students were extremely impressed by the friendly kangaroos, emus and snakes (which were tame enough to pat), as well as the more elusive pademelons.

The remarkable park rangers ran two workshops which increased the children's awareness of our native animals, including the kangaroo, wallaby, pademelon, koalas, emus and snakes. The workshops also included a short course on bush tucker, bush medicine, Aboriginal history, the Australian environment and threats to our rare and endangered species.

It was a wonderful, meaningful trip - both parents and students took home invaluable memories of the park and its animal residents. 

On Friday 8^th June Clifton Hills Primary School Animal Club made a special presentation to their school assembly. Each of the CHPS Animal Club leaders took it in turns to tell the assembly about the whole school food and supply drive being organised by the Animal Club to collect items for the Darling Range Wildlife Shelter and the Animal Protection Society.

The Club leaders also showed the assembly the winning information posters about the food and supply drive made by Animal Club members. They told the students where the posters could be viewed if they wanted to find out about what kind of items they could donate.

Animal Club members displaying their posters at school assembly

Mrs Ritchie then presented each of the Animal Club poster competition winners with an animal related book.

The Naming of a Koala.  On Wednesday 6th June at our Animal Club meeting, Mrs. Ritchie talked to us about Kohuna Wildlife Park and all the good work they do to help the Koalas and other Australian animals.  She then told us about the joeys that had been born at Kohuna and she told us that Clifton Hills Primary School Animal Club would be allowed to name one of the joeys. 

We all had a lot of different names for the joey and because we had to wait and see which koalas would survive we did not know if would be naming a boy koala or a girl koala, so we did a brainstorm of girl koala names and then boy koala names. For the brainstorm Miss Della Franca wrote our ideas on the white board and then we voted on them.

Koalas at the Kohuna Wildlife Sanctuary

We decided that if we are given a girl koala to name we will name her Lilly and if we are given a boy koala we will name him Clifton.  Well, we were given a baby boy koala to name so we called him Clifton.  On Thursday 6th September Mrs. Stoaks, one of our animal club leaders, went to Kohuna and took some pictures of Clifton and his home.

From February throgh June 2007, we used the Blue Cross syllabus covering animal safety and animal care which promotes empathy towards animals and respect for all living things.  In a lesson each week for 8 weeks we looked at recognising when an animal is happy, sad or angry.  It was a fantastic program. 

In May, the Clifton Hills Primary School Animal Club decided to make Piggy Masks.

At our meeting we coloured and decorated our masks. Mrs Ritchie and Miss Della Franca jnr then measured the string for the masks.

Here's one of our Piggy Masks that we made - hope you like it.

We are going to use the ‘Piggy masks’ in a ‘Pig Play’ that the animal club students are going to present at an assembly.

Making the masks was a lot of fun and we all tried so hard on the piggy masks.