News

News

Environmental Orienteering Near Lebyazhy Village

The final event of the spring environmental week in the Museum-Reserve of M.A.Sholokhov, which started on April 24, was the competition “Ecoorienteering” joined by the schoolchildren of the secondary school of Andropovsky Village.

It should be noted that various types of sports orienteering are widely popular nowadays. However, the workers of the Museum-Reserve decided to initiate a special kind – environmental orienteering having no analogues in Russia. Its feature is that children orientate themselves on the location not by cartographical symbols, but observing the peculiarities of different components of natural landscapes. Herewith, the educational process is carried out not only on the basis of conventional traditional programs, but also through field research (monitoring of biodiversity, archaeological excavations, environmental trails development).

Ecoorienteering is a thrilling, adventurous rout filled with different competitions and assignments. Passing through the control points the children guessed environmental crosswords and rebuses, demonstrated their knowledge of cartographical symbols and field orienteering skills meanwhile watching and naming the kinds of birds hidden in the woods.

Besides the encyclopedic knowledge the members of the event had to show accuracy of their eyes visually determining the width of the River Don and the steepness of the shoreline in control point No 2.

At the end of the event the children and museum workers took part in subbotnik symbolically named “Ecodescent” which was held within the frames of the All-Russian Environmental Subbotnik “Green Spring-2017”. The members cleared one of the springs feeding the River Don and cleaned the coastal territory from garbage.

Yana Korobova
Mariya Sukhareva