A Day in the Life
Cathy has been volunteering for six months as our Wildlife Club Volunteer Officer. She volunteers three days a week and has a part time job to supplement her income. Her duties include administering and organising our monthly Wildlife Club as well as helping with the general running of the centre. "I generally ride my bike to work and have a quick cup of tea before starting the day's activities. On a day when a school class is visiting I join the other people leading the day to discuss the topic we are running in a 'mini-meet'.
Once the children arrive I greet them, welcome them to the centre, and somebody introduces the topic to the whole class for about half an hour. This gives me a chance to find out what level of understanding the children have of a topic and helps me pitch my teaching at the right level. The class is then split up into three groups and I take a group of about 10 children to work with for the rest of the day.
A lot of the activities are run outside which is great for the kids even when it's raining and I really like to be outside too. There are guide cards to help me with the teaching and I had plenty of chance to shadow other people teaching before beginning to teach myself. Lot of the activities are designed to be experiential so they are good fun to run. After a lunch break I continue teaching, usually until about 2:30pm when the class goes back to school.
All of the day’s leaders then group together to discuss how the day went and have a well earned cup of tea. There are no cleaners at the centre so we all sign up to do a cleaning job: it’s the kind of place where it's normal for the managers to be cleaning the toilets! For the rest of the afternoon I either work on preparing the next Wildlife Club meeting or, if the weather isn't bad, help with some site work.
There isn't really a 'typical' day of volunteering for me as every day I work at Skelton is different, which is great as I'm always learning new things and involving myself in lots of different experiences."
