A butterfly conservatory was inaugurated on the premises of the government Church Mission School, also referred to as CMS school, in the Old City area on Thursday.
The project is spearheaded by a social impact company, Education Research and the Arts (ERA), in collaboration with the Sindh government’s STEM education programme and the school.
The ERA’s programme manager, Shereen Abdullah, said the “Butterfly Effect” was an experiential learning initiative under which they taught children how to raise butterflies and about their growth.
She said they selected a place in the school to build a conservatory. “Today we have inaugurated the site of this conservatory. We have been running this programme here for a month and a half and during this time, we have have trained the children on how we should work on the population of these butterflies.”
She added that at first, the butterflies were released in the school to enable them to have complete metamorphosis cycle. “In this cycle, there are also eggs and caterpillars, which the children rescued from their own CMS campus.”
She informed that a group of students, including girls and boys, had been formed in the school, which was taking care of the eggs and caterpillars. “When they become butterflies, they will be released into the air. In this way, we will have more and more butterflies in the air, whose population is declining, not only in Pakistan but all over the world. Butterflies are a very important insect for our environment.”
CMS School Principal Rehana Channar said the purpose of the programme was to make children learn by doing. “In this regard, we already had a dream to integrate the environment with it, and to make the children do the things that we are teaching in theory.”
She said that they liked the idea of Butterfly Effect very much because they had been teaching children about butterflies from grade 2.
She explained that the space where the conservatory was being built was earlier used as a dumping ground for garbage so the children were also being taught through the project how to better utilise the available space.
She added that once the conservatory had been developed there, the children would raise butterflies, take care of them and when they had developed fully, they would be released into the environment.
