Rural4kids, rural world opens doors to children

This initiative undoubtedly lays solid foundations for our future. Children, with their work, are the strong demonstration of the fact that supporting youths always proves to be a successful experience. It is essential that even kids have the opportunity to touch on every aspect of rural life, which, in turn, cannot be considered as a mere imagination but as a concrete way of discovering our marvelous countryside and our ancient rural tradition. As a result, thanks to this kind of initiatives, I do believe it is important that young people become aware of the several issues related to their living environment.
Yesterday, at the Cavour Room of the Ministry of Agricultural, Food and Forestry Policies, the Minister Saverio Romano delivered this address, while he was awarding a prize to those primary school five classes that proved themselves to be Rural4Kids winners. This project aimed at fostering a good knowledge of the four most important challenges of rural development among children - water, climate, biodiversity and energy. The Ministry, supported by Giunti Progetti Educativi and thanks to a related educational pathway, created a teaching kit for all the classes involved in Rural4Kids. The related characters of this kit are represented by four environment superheroes, Aquagirl, Climaboy, Biokid e Babyenergy, dedicated to protecting respectively water, climate, biodiversity and energy. Thanks to this kit, which consists of an exercise book for students, a brochure for teachers, a book of characters for children, a cd-rom guide and tools for the related compositions to be written down, children had the opportunity to create an authentic storyline, giving their own contribution to developing the related plot. In order to take part in Rural4kids national competition, each class had to create a story involving the four superheroes as main characters. They could choose whether to create a video, write a composition or make a kind of film thanks to a particular software which, in turn, gave children the possibility of acting as "special directors" of a rural development video, by clicking on a specific object (a tree, a hen or a cloud) or by adding a comic strip too.
During the prize-giving day, the winners gave a small lesson on rural development as perceived by children themselves.