[Olga Sheehy]

Thank you Nicola for your lovely and well thought out plan to follow the schools biodiversity through the seasons. I particularly liked the idea of the “mini beast safari”, I think the children would love this and it really would build such an awareness of all the nature that surrounds the school if we  allow it the opportunity to develop and grow.

[Olga Sheehy]

Module 3

 

Register your garden with the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan and record your actions for pollinators, then outline how you would register your school and what actions you could take to help pollinators

 

Having a keen interest in biodiversity and being very fortunate to have good sized garden that has allowed us to have large wildflower & grass meadows and an orchard, I was very interested to learn about the All-Ireland Pollinator Plan as I had not heard of this before undertaking this course.  Many of the suggested actions for the plan we unbeknownst have undertaken in our garden. I look forward to recording our actions and learning more as part of this Pollinator Plan.

 

We have two areas dedicated to uncut meadows in our garden. We have a long flowering wildflower meadow which we have from early Spring right up to Autumn, we then cut it back until it reappears in early Spring once again. We also have an undisturbed Grass Meadow which we leave uncut over the Winter. Both areas are a hive of activity for birds, insects, mini beasts and small mammals. This is an action I would love to take onboard in our school as part of the Pollinator Plan for our school as I see first-hand the amount of nature and activity there is to be developed by just leaving part of the garden grass area uncut.   Aided by creating self-made bug hotels and log piles to be placed around the uncut grass area there is so much we can do to help pollinators. Through simple actions a world of knowledge would be at the children’s fingertips to explore and monitor.

[Olga Sheehy]

Well done Emma on a fantastic comprehensive lesson. You developed  very interactive and enjoyable lessons all based on the Data sets highlighting the valuable resource that they are. I particularly liked your cross curricular links lesson ideas, thank you.

[Olga Sheehy]

Module 2
For younger classes, describe how you would plan and conduct a lesson on map making and explain how you might incorporate some online tools such as Google maps or Geohive

I would first introduce maps to the young children through story and try to build the connection for them using The Three Little Pigs as a starting point. After reading the story I would pose the problem of another new wolf coming to the area and being unable to find each of the little pig’s houses. The children would discuss how to solve the problem for the wolf. I would try to bridge their knowledge with how we use google maps to find where we are going on long journeys to help the wolf.

We would then explore google maps on the IWB finding how we would get from our school travelling by car to Dublin Zoo/ Emerald Park and other areas of interest for the children. We would then narrow our search and look to google maps to show how we would get from our school to the local church on foot. Using the different tools, I would highlight to the children how we can explore google maps to look at different types of maps for different modes of transport: 2D road maps and satellite photographic maps. This would lead to discussing satellites with me asking where we would get these photographic maps from?

I would then introduce them to PAXI and we would watch the clip from the eesa website which I found very useful during this module. The children would then create a 3D map in groups using blocks and lego for the wolf to follow, sequencing his journey of finding each pig’s house. If time allows the children, then in pairs would draw a 2D map for the wolf to use. This lesson would then led to follow up lessons of the children creating 2D maps of the journey from our school to the church for PAXI to follow. They first would undertake the journey by foot taking note and photos of what we would have to put on our maps. We then would compare and contrast our finished maps with the maps of the same journey produced by Google Maps.

[Olga Sheehy]

I thought this was a lovely lesson idea Amanda, loved how you started with making the connection for the children to their own experiences as a starting point. I can imagine the children would really enjoy being ‘Night time Detectives’ with their telescopes. Loads of opportunity for learning through play which is so important to promote and encourage. Anita’s suggestion of using curricular link of Van Gogh’s Starry Night is also a lovely idea.

[Olga Sheehy]

Module 1 Question:

Having reviewed the paper Unravelling STEM: Beyond the Acronym of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (Liston 2018) reflect on what STEM education looks like in your classroom.

 

The main points which stood out to me following a review of Liston’s paper are as follows:

·       The need for educators to move from seeing STEM as traditional separate subjects and to question what STEM “actually means” (Gerlach, 2012). I am guilty of viewing STEM education in such a traditional way in my classroom.  This paper highlighted the need for us to really understand STEM as being a way to build not just knowledge but a range of strategies and skills to be applied across our daily lives not just as young pupils but as adults alike.

·       The first image proposed by Liston that a STEM population is not about a population that is good at STEM subjects with many prospering STEM industries but is a population that strives to make the world a better place both socially and culturally using the key STEM skills of ‘creativity, problem solving, critical thinking, and communication skills’ to do so. This really led me to question how to approach the development of STEM in the classroom and the necessity for me to change the focus of learning to be skilled based instead of knowledge based.

·       The example given of The concept of STEM: a simple pen by Vasque, 2015 highlighted how to develop STEM skills using the everyday world around us. I thought it was very clever and inspiring. I also learned how technology is not just something industry or technologically based but anything human made to solve a problem. This I think would be the starting points for me going forward to develop STEM education in my classroom. Pose the problem for all the young critical thinkers to try and solve!

[Author]

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