World Animal Day October 4- Humane Education

" Why Celebrate World Animal Day?

Research has shown that there are numerous benefits in encouraging children to care for animals. For young children, looking after a companion animal, whether at home or in the classroom, can help develop a sense of responsibility and compassion, and can help in coming to terms with some of life's more difficult issues, such as bereavement (see 'Super-Humane Kids' below). Sometimes a child who finds it difficult to share his or her troubles with an adult or another child will talk to and confide in an animal, which can help in processing complex emotions.

Celebrating World Animal Day in school is an ideal way to mark the end of a project on animals, whether involving pets, farm animals or wild animals. There are numerous ideas for this in our Get Involved section. The suggestions given cover all areas of the curriculum.

For older students, World Animal Day can be used to introduce more complex ethical issues (conservation, euthanasia, vivisection, vegetarianism, and so on) as well as the more obvious applications to life sciences. A number of suggestions for incorporating World Animal Day across the curriculum can be found in the Get Involved section.

For a more fun approach, teachers might like to look at the KidsZone section of the website, which contains ideas for things to do and a page of language puzzles and quizzes, which are differentiated into levels approximating ages four to seven, eight to eleven and twelve to eighteen."

Bringing pets to school for World Animal Day at St Andrew Catholic School, Fort Worth, Texas

Read More from the World Animal Day site

http://www.worldanimalday.org.uk/education.asp