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Our school is located in Athy, location of the recently newly-redesigned Shackleton Experience museum. The museum is located in a beautiful stone building from the 18th century. A modern glass-enclosed structure was added to one end of the structure, facilitating the display of Antarctic artefacts, and encompassing a new staircase to the upper floors of the museum.
We would visit the exterior of the museum, examining the ways the engineers attached the glass, selected different materials to hold the glass in place, and created a shape that attaches to a very old important structure. Children would surely have many questions about this project and its implementation. Comparisons would be made with photographs of the building before the redesign.
Next, we would explore how to create a similar structure in our own school and explore possible uses for our school population. Models of the school, envisioning a new glass space, would be built, allowing the children to work how they choose, bringing in materials from home and utilising what they find in the classroom. Issues around insulation, environmental impact, safety, and style would all factor into the decisions made for their creations. Presenting their designs and discussing the challenges that would be faced would allow for rich evaluating discussions at the end of the project.Mary Parsons was indeed an extraordinary woman. I had not heard of her until this course. The children would no doubt be inspired by her story.
• Describe how you would involve your pupils in an art, music drama or creative writing project based around your local natural or scientific heritage
A project I plan to do this year with my Senior Infants class is a lovely concertina card flower collage. The children use watercolours to create an abstract background on watercolour paper, learning about this wonderful medium as they work. Next, they paint circle shapes in various colours on another page. Once these have dried, they use a thin marker to draw a flower on each of the dots. The inspiration for the flowers would be a nature walk in the school grounds. Having first looked at some resources to help us learn about the flowers in our area (irishwildflowers.ie and https://www.wildflowersofireland.net/ for example), we would sketch the flowers on our walk.
Back in the classroom, we use our drawings and the resources to make the watercolour dot flowers. The first page with the abstract background serves as a concertina, when cut in two and then folded into a concertina shape. The two pieces can be attached or used separately. The children cut out the flowers and glue them onto the concertina to record their nature walk. Extra pieces of paper are used to make stems, leaves and minibeasts to enhance the finished product. Some children may be inspired to write the names of their flowers on the back and record a fact or two. The final piece can be given as a card to a family member or friend, or kept as a memento of their experience.
This art design can be used to record many themes – insects, trees, fish and so on.
Brilliant lesson. I love the connection between the Vicarstown aqueduct and the classroom activities. It really focusses the children to think like engineers and imagine what the project was like years ago.
Very inspiring Marie. I would love to do this at my school also. It seems like a great way to help the planet, and give the children ownership of their school. Such a great way to foster community.
Last year, my class adopted a tree in our local park and observed the tree as the seasons progressed through the school year. I would expand on that project to conduct a biodiversity study of the park. Many resources mentioned in the module would be useful.
The Tree Council of Ireland tree identification site has a beautiful list of native trees and shrubs, which gives teachers the information they need and is easy for students to access. We could watch the video from Engage with Nature with Dr Paddy Madden as he outlines why diversity in hedgerows is important and what to look for. Armed with this information, we could conduct a survey of the park, collecting data of how many species, how many of each species, leaf shapes and so on.
Flowers, insect life and bird life can also be observed and recorded. The Carlow Sports Partnership Wildflower Walk identification sheet would be very useful. Wildflowers of Ireland website, which has a handy identification tool organised by colour, would be a great tool for Senior Infants to use to research the flowers they find.
They would enjoy the Flower Insect Timed Test, which can be carried out each time we visit. They will see how seasons affect insects. At this age, it‘s so important to let them observe and experience their world.Integration with other subjects would include creating graphs with the data collected, counting trees, leaves, flowers, insects. We would also use the visit as inspiration for art, decorating our news with drawings from our visit, and creating information sheets with colourful images of the flora and fauna we observed. Working together as a class, we would decide how to present our project about the local park. Brochures, posters, and booklets are some ideas we could select. Showing the children the Biodiversity Ireland posters and swatches could inspire them to create something similar. It could be incorporated into map making skills also, adding drawings of our findings to a map of the park.
I think the children would really enjoy this project and would learn a lot about their locality and nature.
Using the framework for inquiry, I would start with a prompt to engage their curiosity, such as the Galway Biodiversity Story Map on the GeoHive website. Selecting the Williamstown Bog tab on this Story Map brings up a beautiful watercolour drawing of the bog. Children in our school could be familiar with our local bogs and will enjoy the connection. Next comes a Google Map of the bog with lots of pins, which indicate locations of birds and plants in the bog.
I would encourage the children to think about how we might create our own map of our school grounds, with information about the plant and animal life we find out there. Children could work in teams, or individually to make a picture, build a map with natural materials, or use a printout from Google Maps, adding details of what they find. As they work on this, they have to work out how to place the items accurately on the map. They are thinking as mapmakers without even realising. Showing items on the map can lead to a discussion about creating a key.
The multi-disciplinary opportunities to build in maths, literacy in many languages, and art are endless with a lesson like this. We will definitely be doing this in Senior Infants this year.
I also found the Liston article very helpful. Integrating all subjects to focus on real-world problems makes so much more sense as an approach to STEM. Showing the children how their learning connects to the local environment is so important at primary level. At Senior Infants level, I find that they love to track the weather each day. It’s been a great way to build their vocabulary around the weather and we compare the weather in our area to weather in places they may have visited, or have family members.
I really appreciated the concept that engineering is what makes that various STEM subjects come together and work as one, rather than as stand-alone subjects. I teach Senior Infants. Last year, the students loved learning about space, and watching the Artemis II mission as they travelled past the moon. We also explored light and colour mixing.
I look forward to using the Rainbow Spinner activity to extend this learning and give the children opportunities to do their own exploring. We can discuss the shape of the spinner, count the number of colours used, and explore how results differ is the colours used, and the quantity of colours used, changes. The children can engineer spinners, modifying and adjusting their designs to explore how that changes the results.
The Curious Minds/ ESERO Framework for Inquiry document examples really gave me confidence to engage with the framework and start to think about how I will create more opportunities to explore our theme in Senior Infants.
Great lesson plan Natasha. I have Senior Infants also, and find that making maps is a very engaging lesson. It’s wonderful to see how they put their conceptual understanding of how the world looks onto paper. We drew maps of the classroom last year. They were so engaged and the final results were great fun to discuss.
Great example of the goals of the STEM policy. I love this idea. We recently completed an extensive building project at our school and I am hoping we will have a school garden soon. A mapping project, overlaying the various species present onsite would be a great way to engage all class levels throughout the school. I could see this being a useful activity for pairing up older and younger classes to work together.