Winter Holidays at the SOSF Shark Education Centre

School holidays are usually a busy time for us at the Centre, and this time around is no exception. Apart from running a Marine Awareness Camp, we’ve also been running our usual Holiday Club for young children from the area. In addition to this, we’ve facilitated workshops for grade 11’s who have been participating in the Ikamva Youth Winter School Programme.

The Holiday Club is really just about having fun and learning about the sea, and in winter we’re often forced to do so indoors. So while we had a particularly awesome rockpooling expedition (where we saw just about everything imaginable), a beach hunt and a harbour tour, we also made marine-themed biscuits and an aquarium in a bottle!

The youth workshops, run at various Cape Town tertiary education institutions, is primarily about trying to create interest in the marine world and to provide information about marine careers. It was interesting to note that much of the participant’s reluctance to get involved with things marine stemmed from their views on sharks. While we tried to provide accurate information to address their concerns about our toothy friends, it was only once they’d seen footage of our younger Marine Explorers diving and returning with limbs intact that we were able to talk about careers.

The Ikamva Youth grade 11’s (aged about 17 years) will need to begin making career choices soon, and these need to be well-informed and carefully considered – we hope that we’ve been able to assist with this. As is sometimes the case with very young children, most of our Holiday Club participants (aged 6 to 10 years) innocently believe that they have already chosen their career path – marine biologists, of course! Perhaps we’ll see them again when they reach grade 11?