[Caitriona Finucane]

I thought that the ‘Home’ film was beautifully made and extremely moving. I don’t think I would show it in it’s entirety to a primary level class but there were sections that would definitelty provide oppourtinities for learning and discussion throughout a term.

The water cycle (science/geography) would tie into the opening sequence and the aerial photography would provide stimulus for art projects. I think showcasing climate change inspired art based on the film would make a good display to raise awareness in the school in general.

The Climate Aid 2020 video was very upsetting and I think I’d have to be careful about which class I would show it to. I think looking at screenshots and still images for and looking at positive ways we can improve our school, homes and local environment would be a good starting point. There is a lot of general anxiety as well as eco anxiety in schools at present and many children get quite upset at climate change content as they don’t have the same concept of time as adults and the longterm scale of a lot of the impacts being discussed often seem more immediate.  In my opinion secondary school students may benefit more from this film but I learned a lot of information that I can share.

[Caitriona Finucane]

Hi Jacqui,

I like your idea of giving the children a choice of county to research. This could easily be tied in with geography projects or international week in school.

Thanks!

[Caitriona Finucane]

I think the map use in the Teal tool and the ability to visualise and manipulate the changes would be a useful tool in increasing the children’s understanding of climate change. There would be a need for some vocabulary work first so this would definitely be part of a series of lessons about weather and climate rather than a standalone lesson. The paxi link was very useful and the David Attenborough video would be helpful in creating optimism and a problem-solving approach as the concept can be quite scary for primary school aged children. The main thing I would improve in the activity is that the activity sheet 3 isn’t easily differentiated and isn’t that accessible for children with dyslexia or other learning needs. I think I’d probably take elements from it and create my own and set a wider variety of challenges.

[Caitriona Finucane]

Hi Niamh,

I agree with your comment that sharing a resource across class levels would be beneficial to everyone. It would be a great activity for the older classes to lead with a junior one and better quality equipment could be bought if it was going to be used regularly.

C

[Caitriona Finucane]

It is encouraging that STEM will be formally recognised in the new Primary Curriculum because, as Maeve Liston (2018) points out, it has been called upon for a long time. It is easy to see how the topic of Climate and Weather could be integrated across plenty of curricular areas and it provides plenty of opportunities for active and discovery learning.

Activity 1: I enjoyed this activity but I think I would copy the statements onto cards and ask the children to manually sort them into weather and climate statements. It would support the learning to look at photos of different climates and each group could write a concept map based on what they see and compare them. I think this lesson could also work for younger pupils in a classroom. I would ask the children about their birthdays but perhaps focus on events throughout the past school year that we might all remember first (e.g. Do you remember when we had sports day/Winter show? What was the weather like? What were we wearing? Did we need hats and coats etc.). It would be great to introduce language like weather and climate as early as possible.

Activity 2: This is a great activity and the children would really enjoy looking at the thermometer each day. For older classes it could be done digitally and graphed over a two week period using school ipads/computers.It would be interesting to put thermometers in different parts of the school indoor and outside as we have a new and old building where temperatures in the classrooms and yards differ greatly. This could lead to discussions about future building design etc.

Reference: Liston, M. (2018). Unravelling STEM: Beyond the Acronym of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics, Science, 53 (3) p 28-29

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