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I am focusing on assignment 1; reflecting on light pollution in my area and how I would engage learners to explore this.
The school that I am in is in a busy town. As a result, my learners are from an urban setting. In this way, I would begin by creating a chart in all of the artificial ways in which we can get light; for example, candles, street lights, car lights, tv lights and so on.
Whilst there are times that artificial light is useful and necessary, such as in hospitals and in night work, I would encourage my learners to create posters encouraging their peers to reduce this light in our environment. This is a useful way to integrate arts and crafts. Some suggestions could include choosing to play outside instead of using screens. Of encouraging day time shopping instead of night time trips. This would actually integrate very well with saving and conserving energy and could actually be advanced by our school’s Green Schools committee. Our school promotes energy conservation to protect the environment, but it could also highlight the impact of light pollution. Another answer offered in this forum talks about highlighting the negative effects that blue light has on sleep cycles. This is also very useful information for my learners.
Hi Eleanor,
I really like the integration aspects that you have included here to engage your learners. I also like the contrasting aspects of urban v rural.
I had never heard of Stellarium before but I found it to be most interesting and suitable for my class.
I would begin by an initial PRK session to garner previous knowledge and goals as to what we may see in the sky. We would expect to see stars/planets/moon and sun.
We would continue by differentiating between what we might see at daylight, and what we might see at night time; perhaps cutting and sticking pictures at this point.As a development, we might look at the Stellarium resource, focusing on times of the year and seasons in which we might see objects both at night and day; for example the moon. Older classes would look at constellations and predict where we might see constellations best; perhaps northern or southern hemisphere?
As a fun link, we might position the stellarium resource at the arctic circle and look at the northern lights.
Hi Eleanor,
<p style=”text-align: left;”>I really like the idea of considering your own home county and environment as a factor when looking at the sky. Many children who live in towns would not often get a chance to observe the night sky.</p>Having 4th class this year, I was drawn to the Earth tube investigative activity. I would certainly include all of our planets in our investigation, as the children could work collaboratively in teams to complete this task. It integrates extremely well with arts in terms of decorating the tubes.
It demonstrates clearly the relationship between mass and weight and this could be highlighted when filling the tubes. Using sand as the contents would be useful as the children could not only feel the difference in weight, but also visually see the difference between say the filling of Earth and Jupiter, for example. As well as this, fun memory games could be incorporated, as the children would have to order them from heaviest to lightest, or even try to identify which planet contains the heaviest mass.Some of the recent data in terms of the damage unsustainable practice has done to our climate, habitats and natural life is alarming. Despite this knowledge and numerous initiatives, it seems that the scale of damage is becoming more and more difficult to reverse. I remember during lockdown seeing pictures of large cities with huge pollution and smog such as Beijing actually appearing clear and being inspired to show this to the children in my class as a talking point for sustainability. This extremely visual stimulus is useful in a classroom setting. In terms of teaching and engaging with sustainability, the school environment is our starting point. Many schools have green flags, and although sustainability and conservation are not always focused on, in my school, they are always ongoing. Each class engages with a sustainability project and shares their findings with other classes. In this way, the children explore where their lunches, toys and packagings come from. Are they sustainable? The children learn a lot through these projects. Our school constantly engages in litter picking twice per week and this is rotated between classes. Furthermore, we aim to try a ‘blackout’ day, where apart from the obvious essential use, we try to not use electricity in our classrooms. This may take the form of not using the interactive whiteboard and engaging in more outdoor lessons for that day.
Totally agree. As part of our green schools initiative, we frequently engage with litter picking and do frequent “bin checks” to ensure that we are recycling. This constant activity puts sustainability at the forefront of children’s thinking.
I found the nutrition of seafood to be of great interest. I find it interesting that Ireland are progressively eating more and more seafood in our diets as we become more and more familiar with the benefits seafood has to offer. Despite this, we lag behind other countries in terms of consumption. As a teacher regularly of the senior end of the school, the children have heard of the food pyramid and roughly know some food groups. In a class setting, I find it interesting to use blank pyramids; allowing the children to fill out the blank spaces themselves in terms of what they think they need most of in their respective diets. In terms of seafood, it might be an interesting idea to allow the children to group certain foods together in terms of the nutrients and vitamins contained in these foods. This is interesting as grouping foods this way would demonstrate the varied vitamins, proteins and minerals present in seafood. This would lead to the conclusions that seafood is a healthy choice in most cases, as it contains a lot of nutrients that other foods may not contain. Furthermore, the nutrients can be graphed in maths and presented for a data strand unit.
I totally agree. A lot of children have a rough knowledge of the food pyramid as prk but do not know the benefits of the different food groups.
I found the four videos particularly interesting, and as I watched them, I found my attention drawn to how I might apply them to my own classroom and practice. In particular, I found video four, relating to the sustainability of seafood to be of interest to our STEM activities.
I would integrate the idea of sustainability to both science and geography. Our school takes great pride in our green flags, and these lessons take relevance to these. Classes may research some Irish fish in their life cycles. Questioning is important. What might impact their life cycles? We would have a discussion on maybe living space, pollution and over fishing. Discussions could be geared towards sustainability in protecting these life cycles. Furthermore, an investigation into living habitats would be a geographical benefit. Children could integrate ict in researching suitable habitats and might even design a habitat for sustainability.As our school focuses on spelling for SSE, word walls and words of the week themed around sustainability could promote an interest in the topic, and ensure that it is highlighted, researched and commonly discussed from the junior end of the school right up to the senior end.
I found this module particularly interesting because it highlights the importance of the west coast of Ireland socio-economically to the country as a whole.
The wild Atlantic Way along the west coast gets a lot of attention in terms of tourism. The location of the aquafarms here may stimulate this as a unique form of tourism. Undoubtedly, I have learned from further research the employment opportunities that are offered through these farms. Furthermore, the clean waters, rugged landscape, sheltered inlets and natural bays lend this area to this purpose.
I understand that rural areas such as these experience extremely high levels of emigration amongst young people as they search for employment opportunities. Highlighting and investing in these sustainable aquatic farming methods will aid this issue. Socially, keeping this as an industry leading job opportunity will keep people living in these areas. Economically, investing in these practices will ensure that Ireland continues to lead the way in its fresh fish and shellfish production.I found this area particularly interesting as it is totally unique and out of the norm as a research piece for children. I live in Wexford, a place famed for aquaculture and marine life. Although it surrounds us, the children are very unaware of the topic as a whole.
The young chef ambassador programme is an area that I think would be very applicable to the students in my school. I believe the idea of responsible sourcing would be very interesting for all involved, and to the class as a whole. Learning where our food comes from and learning how we may buy sustainably is very useful for all to learn. The mentoring this programme involves would also be very useful.