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I totally agree that the series of lessons would be great for a cross-curricular approach. Oral presentations and discussions in English and An Aimsir as Gaeilge. I have participated in the ESB Science Blast on a number of occasions and it is amazing the opportunities that present themselves once you start using the investigative approach. While the focus might be on Science, there are endless roads into other subject areas that the project leads you on.
I agree Fiona – some of the activities are certainly geared more towards the upper end of the school. In our school, we have paired classes together – 6th with 2nd, 5th with 1st etc. Perhaps a similar approach could be used if the whole school was focusing on the topic of weather and climate – a sort of buddy system to allow the children to learn from each other.
When you look at any topic in STEM or SESE or any topic at all for that matter, I think the key to understanding is knowing where the children are already and building on that information. That is why the Curious Minds template is of particular use in the case of STEM lessons and this lesson on Climate change in particular. In lesson 1 and 2, we focused on weather and logically, we need to review that knowledge before starting into the Climate Reporter exercise.
That’s why I think the Paxi video is a great little starting point. There is a fair bit of terminology used in it and these act like a refresher of what the children already know. If I were working on these lessons with my class, I would create a word wall, either on the IWB or physically, with a list of terms and phrases that we come across. This would tie in nicely with the weather lore that we would generate from speaking with parents/grandparents.
The use of the TEAL tool ties in nicely with data generation and graphs in maths and would be an interesting activity, particular for senior classes. I think it would be great to get different groups within the class to focus on different aspects as generated by TEAL – precipitation, wind speed, solar radiation etc. and to produce a poster or powerpoint or presentation of some sort based on what they find out.
I particularly like the idea of sharing the findings with the rest of the school – aside from bringing the work to the attention of the whole school community, this also adds value to the work of the children. Seeing others read and appreciate the effort that they have put in gives them a great sense of ownership and achievement.
As part of a recent project on weather as Gaeilge, we used a green screen to make our own weather forecast. Granted, the forecasts were very basic (and often made up!) based on the Irish the children had, but there is no reason why this activity couldn’t be extended to actually reflect the readings taken in the weather station and forecast the weather.
Having looked through the Weather vs Climate resource, I think that a younger class in particular would find them informative and engaging. There are very good background notes for teachers and the activities themselves are accessible and easy to accomplish. I would suggest that older classes might need to take things a bit further. The initial lessons provide for a certain amount of investigation but I feel that classes towards the upper end of Primary School might need to delve a bit deeper into the topics. Combining the question of STEM with weather and climate monitoring, I think it would be a fabulous idea to create a weather station on the school campus. Obviously there are issues that would need to be addressed – where to site the station, what to make the various devices from, how to build and monitor the different devices, however, I think the benefits of participating in such a project would be huge for the children and enquiry based hands-on learning would be to the fore.
Having browsed through the paper by Liston (2018) on exploding the acronym of STEM, the key point that stands out for me is that STEM is more than just 4 separate subjects, but rather something that can be integrated into all subject areas. I suppose that is one of the key concepts of the new primary curriculum – to treat nothing in isolation – language impacts maths, maths impacts art and music etc. Everything is inter-connected.
In my own class, I try to find opportunities for STEM in as many areas as possible. I find it is particularly relevant in history, where advances in technology can be looked at very easily – the Industrial Revolution being a very clear example of this. However, engineering and science also play a huge part in art activities – the design and make strand of the Science curriculum being a case in point. There are so many opportunities to make connections across the curriculum that treating STEM in isolation seems rather daft.
