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We have implemented sustainable practices within our school such as having an outdoor classroom that we bought this year and a big school garden. One of the AP2 posts specialises in gardening where the member of staff has to design activities for classes to do in the outdoor classroom associated with the school garden. Every Friday we have a gardening teacher who comes in and spends 2 hours with a class to complete gardening tasks. The produce we have in the garden is sold every Friday by the students outside the school gate.
I think this can be expanded through SPHE and SESE by asking questions to students such as how could you be sustainable in your every day life, how can you contribute to the UN Sustainable Development Goals, what labels should you look out for in a shop to know you are buying sustainable food and finally what groups can practice sustainability in your local area and how are they doing this.
Hello Grainne
I love how your school is so sustainable which I feel is so important. These are great ideas and I would love to share these ideas with our staff. Thank you.
Seafood is a wonderful source of nutrition as it contains protein, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, minerals and amino acids. In particular it contains omega 3 fatty acids, iron and vitamin D. I think it is important to let students know how good seafood is for them. They need to know that seafood is found in the protein layer of the food pyramid. Protein is important for muscle growth and development.
In order to show students how nutritional seafood is they could be put into pairs with an iPad and they can find pictures of seafood products and their nutritional information. When the students find these products online they can identify what labels and certificates they can see on them. It can be made into a little game where the students have to work in their pairs to find the seafood with the highest protein, vitamin D, fats, carbohydrates and iron content for example.
Hello Azora
This is a great guide. Thank you for posting the link. I will be showing this to my students in September.
The online ARC lessons and resources provide a great range of topics that I can see my class loving. It is great to have the use of these and I plan on using these next year. Since I have done this summer course it would be great to take this new understanding that I now have on Aquaculture and to share it with staff at a Croke Park meeting for something different. I would encourage the staff to use the ARC lessons and resources in the senior classes and to arrange for the ARC to come and visit our school. I would also consider establishing a Marine or Aquaculture team in our school and to look at the possibility of obtaining a Blue Schools Award as we don’t have that award yet. I would love to go into more detail on carrying out group classroom projects on marine species that we did last year.
Hello Michelle
I would never have thought about using the Salmon of Knowledge story and teaching it in a cross curricular way. Thank you for such a great idea. I will use this with my class next year.
Unfortunately I have very little knowledge on aquaculture. However, this module highlighted that the west coast is where aquaculture takes place in Ireland due to its easy access to ports/harbours/inlets and other features along the shores coastline which makes complete sense.
It was interesting to learn that Atlantic salmon is placed along the west coast of Ireland because most of the Atlantic Ocean coastline has deep water and is easy to reach because there are many piers and harbours. These salmon farms need shelter from storms as they need to be tucked in behind islands to be facing the Atlantic Ocean. Hence the west coast of Ireland is an ideal area for salmon farms for these reasons stated above.
Aquaculture farms contribute socio-economically to coastal communities as they provide people with a lot of job opportunities in the area. These jobs are particularly valuable in rural and remote areas where employment opportunities can be limited. Then this money would be more than likely spent locally by employees and people who are visiting the farms.
I decided to do this course as I wanted to extend my knowledge on aquaculture in Ireland. This year my class was very fortunate to receive a workshop on educating them about salmon. The students loved it and found it to be very informative. That is why when I saw this course advertised I knew it would be the most beneficial one for me to do during the summer.
I have a lot of students who were extremely interested in this area after our workshop and it would be lovely to show them all the different areas that they could branch in to if they wanted this to be their future career. I was so unaware of the ARC and it is definitely something I will be putting my school on the waiting list for. It is amazing how it would be set up on the school grounds in less than 30 minutes. It sounds extremely interactive which is so important for 5th/6th class students. I know for a fact they would be amazed by the VR headsets. I can’t believe it is also free of charge. The interior seems to be designed to an extremely high standard that looks immersive, interactive and modern which you can guarantee would captivate the students.
I also think that 5th/6th will benefit a lot from the BIM lessons as they don’t live in a seaside area so this is something that a lot of them have little to no experience of. I think it would be beneficial for them to be more educated on this area going forward as they really love it and can’t seem to get enough of.
