Forum Replies Created
-
Posts
-
Hi Laura,
I love your idea of linking the school more closely with farming and food production in the area. In my school there are very few children from farming backgrounds yet there are farms to be seen all around. It would be great to do farm visits and get in speakers in order to close that gap.
I teach in Carrigaline in Co. Cork. It is a fast growing suburban town and while there are some admirable sustainability efforts visible its important to keep pushing for more. The local Supervalu is very proud of its 430 solar panels, which provides much of the store’s electricity. There are of course several new return recycling pods around the town. There are ongoing public realm improvements around the town which prioritise walking and cycling much more than they would have in the past. New housing estates are popping up constantly and the new houses are all A rated with solar panels and heat pumps. The council no longer mows all the grass on verges of the road regularly to allow a wider variety of Irish wildflowers and their pollinators to thrive (although I notice many of the private maintenance companies tending to the estates still spray herbicides and mow regularly to keep it all looking ‘neat’.) The tidy towns as always is a great engine for community development and they do great work in planting native trees and flowers.
In the class I think its really important to critically assess the sustainability efforts around us. Some organisations and businesses are genuinely investing in long term sustainability while others are engaged in ‘greenwashing’. With older classes in particular I think that we should be teaching the children critical thinking skills so that they can see though spin. Its important to show that sustainability is something that they can be part of. We already have a lovely small garden as well as an orchard (no apples yet) and a modest meadow. We have also just started a new school vegetable garden which I hope will spur a raft of more outdoor and sustainable teaching and learning in our school.
I agree Niamh that shopping with the parents and being conscious of where their food comes from is a really important part of a child’s education. It teaches them important life skills and maybe they can even influence their parents to make healthy sustainable choices too!
Seafood nutrition is definitely something that needs to be highlighted within the classroom. As outlined in the module, seafood is an incredibly nutritious food source but one that is not eaten enough in Ireland, particularly considering our status as an island nation.
Seafood is a healthy whole food, natural and sustainable when harvested correctly. Oily fish in particular, like salmon, mackerel and halibut were highlighted as having multiple health benefits. I was just reading in the newspaper about the dubious health benefits of almost all the health supplements and vitamins on the market. It seems mad that this is a multi billion euro industry when healthy sources of these nutrients are right on our doorstep in the form of seafood.
Lessons in class should highlight these health benefits and enable children to identify the nutritional properties of fish for themselves. For younger children the Salmon of Knowledge tale is a great way to highlight the ‘brain food’ aspects of oily fish. For older children the I spy activity would help them to develop as informed critical consumers.
Hi Orla, I’m with you on the value of quizzes. Letting the children know that there is a quiz at the end of the lesson really ups the engagement and supplies a little competitive spice! As you say, who doesn’t love a quiz?
What I really like about the ARC online lessons is how I can use them across a range of curricular areas. Obviously they are primarily based in the STEM subjects of maths and science but they could also be taught in a geography context, looking at the locations and landscapes of aquaculture in Ireland, or in history context, looking at changing dietary patterns, or in an SPHE context, looking at nutrition. As I work in an Educate Together school we also have our ethical curriculum instead of religious education and the sustainability aspect of aquaculture fits in really nicely with the ethics and the environment strand. In a busy timetable it is essential that if we are to teach children about a topic like aquaculture in any depth (pardon the pun) it has to be across a broad range of subjects, hitting a lot of learning objectives in order to justify the time taken.
As part of this the four online lessons highlighted could act as a really good base for a series of lessons around the theme of aquaculture in Ireland. The videos are very well produced and well pitched to a primary school audience. When building lessons based on these resources it would be important to use a STEM frame of mind and skillset. With our new maths curriculum we are seeing the need to broaden our use of maths outside of the textbook and apply maths skills to the wider world. We could look at aquaculture from a mathematical perspective, for example creating graphs or creating and solving problems. This STEM approach is something that should be applied right across a range of subjects and may be something to engage with further in a future SSE cycle within our school.
I live in a rural area of Cork which is dominated by dairy agriculture. Farming, and dairy in particular, is obviously going through a period of great transition. As mentioned in the module, our ‘Goldilocks’ climate gives Ireland the ability to farm really productively. However it is now apparent that some of our more intensive farming practices are just not sustainable and we need to look at a broader, more varied approach to providing food and jobs.
As highlighted in this module, aquaculture should play a huge part in this transition. Food producers along the western coasts of Ireland have long been disadvantaged compared to those farming the more fertile lowlands to the east. It seems clear that the same geographical features that disadvantage farmers in the west can be to their advantage when it comes to aquaculture.
I’d love to imagine a future where varied and sustainable dairy, arable and horticulture farming are widespread across much of the island and the western shore is home to a rich aquaculture sector with salmon, oyster and mussel farms. This could bring much needed jobs and even a cultural revival to towns and villages in rural, coastal areas.
I definitely think that we all, including the children in our classes, would benefit from learning more about the food we eat and where it comes from. I recently read a book called ‘Ultra processed People’ by Chris van Tullekan which was a shocking read. It outlined how most of us now primarily eat ultra processed foods from packets which are detrimental to our health and the world around us. It was like reading a piece of dystopian science fiction except it describes the real world. We are becoming more and more distant from the real, natural world and the real food it provides. I’m glad I chose this course as I want to get a balanced view of where our food comes from and the sustainable choices we have.
This module has provided me with a solid understanding of aquaculture in an Irish context. I could use some of the videos and additional resources to teach the children all about where their seafood comes from. The life cycle of the salmon is a great lesson of course and fits in really well with the SESE curriculum. My school is on an estuary and is relatively close to the shore. Many of the children will have seen oyster trestles and bags and probably don’t know what they are. I look forward to connecting this knowledge with the children’s real life observations.
The social license projects were really interesting to look at. Obviously the ARC looks amazing and I can imagine the children in our school being really engaged with the content when taught in such a well resourced, technologically advanced way.
I love that idea of focusing on the weather Mary. There are loads of these and I know I’ve heard a few new ones from staff members from different counties. The idea of inviting in older members of the community to speak is also really important. Without passing on that knowledge it could be lost.
Prepare a school project to collect Piseógs/Traditions/Stories of the Night.
I really like the idea of doing a school project with children around piseógs to do with the night. Most stories of people being accosted by the little people, na daoine maithe or na sí are set at night. Often there are descriptions of a dark night as someone walks home alone from a neighbour’s house after a night of telling stories or playing cards. You can really imagine the darkness of the quiet country boithríns, an experience that must have been common a few generations ago.
I would discuss common stories, folklore and piseógs around the theme of the night with the children. We would look at the coming of St. Brigid to bless the brat Bríde during the night, or the meeting with the Púca at midnight crossroads. We would of course also discuss that most important night of all, Oíche Shamhna, Halloween. I would gather the children’s own understanding of this nighttime folklore and then we would look at some stories from Duchas’ Schools Collection. We would identify similarities and differences (and also note the beautiful handwriting!).
I would then assign the children a homework task, to gather any nighttime piseógs or stories their own families might have. We have many children from other cultures in our school so it would be great to enrich our own tales with some different traditions.
As part of ongoing English lessons we would then write our own stories as if we were adding to the Duchas Schools Collection.
I love the way your ideas include a lot of integration of Geography and History and Science into this biodiversity lesson. Making maps and looking at old buildings mixed with studying light makes for a really well integrated SESE lesson.
How you would engage your learners to explore biodiversity in your local area and the possible impacts of light pollution on local biodiversity.
I think that an awareness of local biodiversity should be an essential component of our primary school curriculum. Last year, for the first time, I put aside a weekly time slot for biodiversity lessons. I used the ‘bitesize biodiversity’ resources from the Irish Schools Sustainability Network. Every week we would look at a slideshow of a different organism and take notes in a dedicated nature copy. An essential component of the lesson was that we would leave the classroom and go outside, either in the grounds of the school or nearby.I felt it essential that the creatures we studied in the class could actually be encountered by the pupils. I would select the lesson based on time of the year and what I knew was growing in the surrounding area. In this way the children had real world experiences of actually holding woodlice, slugs, snails, worms, hawthorn and alder trees etc. It was a highlight of the weeks timetable and I will absolutely be doing this again next year.
Following this course I will try to integrate lessons about light pollution into these lessons. We could do a lesson on bats and on the nature walk section of the lesson we would look for sources of light pollution as well as areas we think would be good feeding grounds for bats. I could then assign bat observation homework, asking the children to observe the sky around their homes for bat activity. Some of the children live very near the school and could even observe the school grounds.
I think its really interesting that having read many of the comments on this forum it is really apparent that many of us have, at some stage, lived rurally and been exposed to really good dark skies. Because of shifting demographics this is a privilege that fewer and fewer children are enjoying. All the more reason to preserve the dark skies we have.
Detail how light pollution is impacting your local area and how you would engage your learners to explore this
I grew up in a rural setting not far from Cork city. Looking at the light pollution map from 1997 as shown in the module, I would have had a very good quality of stargazing as a kid. However I can’t say that I have any strong memories of the night sky from my childhood which is a bit disappointing and surprising as I was a very outdoorsy child. I do have a clear memory of first seeing the Milky Way, I was in my 20s, camping in the Glen of Aherlow in Tipperary, lying down and looking up at the sky. It was a revelation, even though the same sky must have been apparent over my head countless times before if only I had had the knowledge and desire to perceive it.
I still live rurally near Cork city and teach in a nearby suburban town. According to the light pollution map on http://www.lightpollutionmap.info the children I teach live with light levels of 20.8 magnitude/arc second so the kids should still be able to see the Milky Way on a good night. This lesson has highlighted to me how important it is that the children are made aware of the wonders of the sky above them. This might drive them to look for darker skies and become active in making their environment a less light polluted area.
Hi Deirdre,
I’ve really loved learning about Stellarium too. I’ve used it myself in the past but I’ve never used it as a teaching resource. Like you said, downloading it to the school Ipads is a great way to get it in the kids hands. Once they get the hang of it, through tutorials or direct instruction, it would be a great use of our scheduled ‘Ipad time’. I agree that free exploration in pairs is the way to go.