It's not every day you go to a one-eyed camel's second birthday party, but our reporter, Olivia Preston, did just that this week when she visited Woburn Safari Park, the world's first zoological collection to become 'symbol-friendly'.
Students from Windmill Hill School in Luton made some tasty treats for Wednesday, the Bactrian camel who lost his eye as a baby.
Students from Windmill Hill School in Luton made some tasty treats for Wednesday, the Bactrian camel who lost his eye as a baby.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00 Woburn Safari Park invited students from a special school in Newton to celebrate Wednesday's
00:11 birthday, the one-eyed camel. The park in Bedfordshire is the first in the world to
00:15 become symbol friendly, using widget pictures to help visitors communicate and learn more
00:20 about the park. The students made a special birthday box for two-year-old Wednesday who
00:39 lost his eye as a baby. Alex, Yusuf, Eunice, Marcus and Casey got some tasty treats ready
00:46 and delivered the goods to Wednesday and his friends. Rebecca Lynch is a symbol specialist
00:55 from Widget and helped the children to understand the activity using symbol boards. She explained
01:02 why inclusive signs and texts are so important. So it's essential that companies like Woburn
01:09 are doing, start using symbols in the environment around them. Coming somewhere new can be really
01:15 daunting and it can be quite anxiety-provoking. The children don't know where they're going,
01:19 there's new sights, there's new sounds, there's new smells. Using symbols we can prepare children
01:25 for the journey that they're coming on so we can prepare them well in advance. Once
01:29 they're here they can then refer back to those so they know where things are, what it is
01:33 that they're going to see. And then as they move around the park and then any other setting,
01:38 if you've got those symbols in place that's consistency so those children then can access
01:43 and communicate and interact as everyone should have the right to be able to do. Also at the
01:49 event was speech and language therapist Laura Black who helped build some of the accessible
01:54 resources for the park. I worked together with Woburn to create social scripts so that
02:02 these are supported by the Widget symbols also so they can read these through before
02:06 coming to the Safari Park to get an idea of what's it going to look like, what's going
02:12 to happen when they arrive, what's the drive-thru, the Safari going to look like, where can they
02:16 go and eat, what happens if they need to go to the toilet. And it talks through kind of
02:21 every situation that they might encounter and that in itself can help with their understanding
02:27 but also reduce their anxiety about coming somewhere big and new like this. Today the
02:35 symbols have really helped them obviously with the understanding of the task that they're
02:38 going to do, helping them complete it independently and it's so brilliant that Woburn Safari Park
02:44 has been the leader in doing something like this and hopefully lots of other organisations
02:51 will think now about how they can make themselves more communication friendly.
03:05 The event was the brainchild of Natasha Kyle, the Head of Education and Customer Liaison
03:10 at Woburn Safari Park. In her time at the Zoological Collection, her focus has been
03:15 on making the Safari experience as inclusive as possible.
03:19 So today's a really important day because everything's come together, the symbol guides
03:23 were celebrating, we're obviously also celebrating that we're the first Zoological Collection
03:28 in the world to become symbol friendly which is amazing. I had no idea that this was going
03:33 to take off the way that it has and would be here where we are today so yeah it's a
03:39 really special day. Wednesday is obviously a little bit different to our alpha camels
03:45 which is fine but he has one eye and we just want to show the children that it's fine to
03:51 be different and we're celebrating that and I don't think there's anything more positive
03:56 that we can do other than a camel birthday party.