Pygmy Hippos Charity
Last week, some of the children in Year 6 visited London Zoo with some of the children from St. Matthew’s. We were very fortunate because the sun was shining and it did not rain. Although the journey on the coach was quite long, we could not wait to visit the Pygmy Hippopotamuses.
When we arrived, we went straight to look at the endangered pygmy hippos. When we found their enclosure, we witnessed that it was virtually empty ….it turns out that the zoo are moving them to a new enclosure.
Arriving back at school, we decided that we would like to raise money in order to help the zoo create a new, more exciting enclosure that would benefit Thug and Nicky-Noo (the pygmy hippos).
Eventually, after lots of discussion, we came up with an idea. We thought that we could have a cake sale but first of all we knew that we would have to do some persuading. We had to persuade Miss Popil to allow us to have the sale and also manage to convince the PTA to lend us some money so we could buy the ingredients needed. Fortunately, after listening to our presentation, they both agreed and we started on our plans.
First of all, we needed to set a date - Friday 28th February 2014, just before lunchtime . We then made some colourful posters to advertise the event; though this seems simple enough, Ms Popil had some high expectations to meet before allowing these on her school windows. We then spent all our time on Thursday afternoon decorating and making delicious cakes to sell – this required some tricky maths skills, including ratio and proportion. Some of us even went home to practise these skills and baked some to sell for the next day.
The cake sale was a huge success and we’ve calculated a £250 profit, after using our amazing new found sales techniques.
We hope that the zoo will use this money to help provide the pygmy hippos with a suitable shelter for sleeping in during the day as they are nocturnal animals. We also hope they will plant some bamboo plants, include a relaxing mud pool and even some toys for them to play with.
We would like to say a massive thank-you to the people who bought our cakes or just donated money. Perhaps you might want to go and see what our money has helped achieve?