Francesca Vella
BirdLife Malta and Bank of Valletta yesterday launched the 2007 Dinja Wahda Action Guide, the environmental education programme for primary school children that has been improved upon and will now start running on a yearly basis.
Since BirdLife Malta’s environmental education programme was first introduced in 1994, it has targeted more than 80,000 children.
Children from about 70 schools, together with heads of school and teachers participated in an event at Savio College in Dingli yesterday, to mark the launch of this year’s programme.
George Pullicino, Environment and Rural Affairs Minister, who was among those present for the event, told the children he believed that programmes such as Dinja Wahda could actually prove to be more beneficial than their formal education.
He spoke to the children about other programmes, such as Ekoskola, which encourages children to take environment-friendly decisions.
Desireé Falzon, BirdLife Malta’s chairman and education committee coordinator, said: “Dinja Wahda aims to provide students with a firm grounding in environmental awareness, while adopting an innovative and entertaining approach.
“This year’s Action Guide is more exciting and colourful than ever, with proposed activities having increased from 18 to 30 from the previous edition. This is also thanks to the Bank of Valletta, which has become our education partner in this project.”
Igino Xuereb from Bank of Valletta said the bank was delighted to support the project. He said the bank’s sponsorship consolidates its involvement in community initiatives of an educational and environmental nature, having invested Lm600,000 (EUR1.4 million) in such initiatives over the past two years.
“We are particularly proud that thanks to our support, the Dinja Wahda programme will become an annual feature in schools’ extra-curricular activities, reaching an even larger number of school children,” said Mr Xuereb.
During yesterday’s event, Jacqueline Licari, a student from Guzeppi Agius Paola Primary B School, shared her experience of last year’s Dinja Wahda activities.
She spoke about the various environment-friendly initiatives at her school, from waste separation, to bird table construction, the use of cloth shopping bags and even a solar panel experiment.
More importantly, she explained that since then, she also introduced a number of these initiatives and other energy-saving measures at home.
Dinja Wahda schools coordinator Albert Attard will be distributing the Action Guide to all primary schools in Malta and Gozo. This year, BirdLife has striven to make the Action Guide more effective by providing a number of other ideas for teachers to make use of in class.
Teachers are free to choose the activities they would like to carry out with their class. Each activity carries points according to the level of commitment required. At the end of the scholastic year, gold, silver and bronze awards will be presented to the schools that made the best effort for the environment. Interested schools should contact Mr Attard by sending an email to albert.attard@birdlife
malta.org or by calling tel. 2134 -7644/5.