Beautiful Bay in May for Schools

Beautiful Bay in May 2024 – inspiration for learning in nature!

This May, Biodiversity Hawke’s Bay (BHB) and the National Aquarium of New Zealand (NANZ) want to give you some brilliant ideas and resources to help connect your tamariki and young people with nature and biodiversity with the Beautiful Bay in May!

Beautiful Bay in May (BBiM) is essentially 31 awesome activities to inspire you to get out in nature with your students. You don’t need to do all 31, just doing one will provide some excitement outside and will no doubt be easy to adapt for other teaching purposes too.

The 31 activities have been specifically developed using the Five Pathways of Nature Connection, which aims to build Nature Connectedness.  Connection to nature describes our lasting relationship with nature, including emotions, attitudes and behaviour. People with a greater connection to nature are more likely to behave positively towards the environment, wildlife and habitats, in addition to greater mental wellbeing, lower blood pressure and less stress.

Resource Packs

This year, we have developed specific resource packs to inspire schools that includes the 31 activities, extra resources to support the activities and even some simple evaluation to provide teachers with some assessment for learning across the activities too.

Take Part

Keen to take part? Access the Schools Resource Pack for BBiM 2024 and let us know that you’re keen to get your class involved by emailing our education team with your name and your school name.

Download the BBiM Schools Resource Pack

Email our team

Assessment for learning within BBiM

We are very keen to support evaluation of learners’ experiences with BBiM, specifically looking at their Nature Connectedness.

Our evaluation will use a very quick, simple, illustrated scale called the Inclusion of Nature in Self (INS), a measure developed to assess Nature Connectedness. It is a one-step measure which gets right to the heart of Nature Connectedness by simply asking learners to choose the diagram that best describes their relationship with nature.

We will send the postage-paid packs to you after you let us know you’re keen to participate in BBiM. You simply do the quick one-step evaluation in class before you start BBiM and then also after you’ve done one, or a number, of the activities. Then send the packs back to us and we will send you your class results once we’ve had a chance to analyse them. All children will be unidentifiable to us.

The process will look like:

We will also send a teacher specific survey pre and post participation in the campaign, but more aligned to your motivations to take part and how you found the experience with a chance to help us improve it for next year.

We are so grateful for any participation in this as we want to make learning experiences in nature as rich and meaningful for learners as we can.