The Vision Australia Library hosted a t-rexcellent day on Thursday at Kooyong with our final intergenerational storytime for the year!
Senior clients from the Thursdays recreational group were joined by 30 children from Winter Street Kindergarten and Hawthorn Early Years Kindergarten for an awesome morning with special guest palaeontologists and dino-superstars Adele Pentland and Doris Seegets-Villiers from PrimeSCI.
Doris Seegets-Villiers, is fossil specimen inspector who has had her own dinosaur named after her: the Galleonosaurus Dorisae.
Doris facilitated a tactile experience for the group with tables covered in specimens, casts, and replicas of dinosaurs and materials that let the children and older participants experience dinosaurs on a whole new level.
Adele, based in Winton, Queensland (About 14 hours from Brisbane), is from the Australian Age of Dinosaurs Museum of Natural History, and has a special connection to flying dinosaurs, in particular the "Iron Dragon" pterosaur, the most complete pterosaur specimen ever found (ferrodraco lentoni);
Adele chatted to the children and our clients about her work in palaeontology, what goes into discovering fossils, and even a funny chat about the importance of dinosaur poo!
In the photo below, our clients and young friends recreate a life-size stegosaurus. Standing in a long row with children between them, client Michael is holding the skull bone, Owen is holding the thagomizer (back plate) and at the end Kevin is holding a tail spike. Amazing to get a sense of how gigantic the dinosaurs were!
The library’s intergenerational storytimes give our clients a special chance to interact across generations, as well as sharing what we do at Vision Australia with our local community. For our young friends, a visit to Vision Australia opens up opportunities to discuss inclusion and disability.
Thank you to Georgie from the Thursday Recreation Group, the CYP team who were on hand to assist, and our new friends from Winter Street and Hawthorn Early Years Kindergarten for joining us!
