Year 5 News

Year 5 excursion to Werribee Zoo

On the 16th of August all of Year 5 students went by bus to visit Werribee Zoo. The aim of the visit was to learn more about the relationship between humans, animals and geography and how humans are affecting the Gorillas. Animals that were spotted at the zoo included Gorillas, Rhinos, Zebras, Meerkats, Giraffes, Ostrich, Lions, Hippopotamus, Wild Dogs, Monkeys, Emus among others.

The three main experiences that we enjoyed were:

• the Safari of the Werribee Zoo savannah, where we learnt about animals that lived there,
• the Gorilla workshop where we learned about the relationships between humans, animals and the environment, and
• roaming around the Zoo, learning about the African and Australian animals that live there. 

Some of the interesting facts that we learnt from our visit were that:

• antelopes can jump up to three metres high so that is why the zoo has extremely high gates to keep them in,
• Cheetahs can also leap eight metres
• there were 3 Gorillas who lived at the zoo; we learnt that there is always a male leader in the group. In this case there was a father and two sons, one of the sons was the leader because the father trained him to become dominant. 

We participated in a role play where we had to be detectives to find out who was guilty of endangering the Gorillas, students were put into the following groups: farmers, rangers, tourists and miners. Each group had to defend their case and accuse someone else of the endangerment then give reasons why they chose that group. This made us more aware of how human actions can affect different types of animal species. 

Our experience of Werribee Zoo was fun and educational, we thoroughly enjoyed it and hope we could go another time!