Supported projects

Chrudim - ”The Considerate Little Bug,” a project of the Chrudim Mama Club Do you know the story? “The sun was inching towards the west and the little buglet was just getting up.”

The mothers of the Chrudim Mama Club, one of more than 100 Mothers’ Centers established in the Czech Republic since 1990, are not indifferent to this problem. All of the centers share – in addition to a bottom-up approach to family self-help based on volunteer work, informality and solidarity - the aim to engage the interest of young children in nature from an early age and to cultivate a relationship between children and the nature which surrounds them.

And thus, we come back to Jan Karafiát and his book. In November 2004, the Mama Club launched The Considerate Little Bug project for preschoolers and school children and their families, the aim of which is to draw children back to nature and plant a seed of understanding about its laws. Easily said, but how to do it?

The Mama Club chose the mediums most understandable to children: fairy tales, personal experience and hands-on activities. In November 2004, the program sponsored a lantern procession through the town, on the way to the Little Bug’s “winter hibernation.” Martin Dejdar, a famous Czech actor, served as the evening’s patron. Children, parents and grandparents took part in the procession and the town square twinkled with the lights of the numerous lanterns, while scenes from Karafiát’s The Little Buglet were enacted on a stage.

Following the Bug’s “hibernation,” the Mama Club organized a cycle of six 50-minute morning environmental programs called “The Considerate Little Bug School.” The programs combined storytelling, exercise, yoga for children, and theater accompanied by an arts and crafts program. The program was divided into special sections: “The Bee” – all about how bees live in the hive; “How the Mole Got Trousers” – where the children listened to the well-known story and then tried to make thread from flax and weave it into cloth; “Food for Birds” – in which children listened to a tale about how animals prepare for winter and then made bird feeders. The program continued through 2005 with a section dedicated to paper-making with lessons on the importance of sorting trash for recycling and “Spring Has Come to the Countryside,” in which children pretended they were opening buds in the spring and animals awakening from winter hibernation.

What can we say in conclusion? Perhaps it is best to close with the words of Regina Losenická from the Mama Club, who was responsible for The Considerate Little Bug program: “I think that our meetings helped children to begin to think about the nature around them as a good friend, with whom it is rewarding to be with and to have fun with, but also as something that needs to be looked after. The mothers also made the discovery that, at a time when it is possible to buy everything readymade, creating something with your own hands, even if it is not completely perfect, is priceless for both them and their dear ones.”

Project was support by "The Procter & Gamble Program for Mothers’ Centers".

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