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Describe how you would involve your pupils in an art, music drama or creative writing project based around your local natural or scientific heritage
Based on Tullamore’s natural heritage, the children will create mixed-media artwork inspired by the biodiversity of the local Grand Canal and nearby Charleville Castle woodlands.
We go on a walk to Charleville Castle woods twice annually to explore the natural environment. We will go on a nature walk in the woods and by the canal to look for native flora and fauna. The children will gather some nature and then Back in the classroom, the pupils will use oil pastels to draw the outlines of their chosen animals or plants onto heavy paper. Next, they will apply a watercolor wash over the top.
The children will glue real fallen leaves and twigs collected during our walk to the borders of their pages, adding texture and a literal piece of Tullamore’s ecosystem to their art. This project blends scientific observation with creativity, allowing children to appreciate and display their local natural environment.
I teach 2nd class in Tullamore. I would use the historic stone bridges along the Grand Canal in Tullamore as inspiration as they are well aware of and walk over daily.
After exploring the bridges and exploring how shapes affect structural strength, and linking directly to the local canal infrastructure, the children will use recycled materials such as recycled cardboard, paper cups, lollipop sticks, masking tape, and blocks or lego to make a bridge.
Working in small groups, the children will design and construct their own miniature bridges to span a 30cm “canal” gap on their desks.
Children test their structures by gradually adding toy cars or blocks to see how much weight their bridge can support before bending, encouraging basic teamwork and problem-solving.Maths would be incorporated by measuring the length of the bridge. The children could estimate how many toy cars their bridge can hold and weigh them. The children could collect and record data on the amount of cars bridges held.
I hope to do some similar ideas in my school. We had a woman in from An Taisce this year and she was very good – you could reach out to them as an external professional as you mentioned.
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.
I will join the All-Ireland Pollinator plan when I return to school in September. I am part of the gardening committee in my school so it will assist me to do what I’m already doing. I hope to introduce an area of grass in the school as a wildflower garden. We already have an area that is not mowed but I hope to plant some seeds during the year.
We had a lady from Taisce last year to teach about biodiversity and I hope to welcome her back during the coming academic year.
I will plant some pollinator-friendly flower bulbs or trees with the gardening committee. Another plan I thought of through exploring the All ireland Pollinator website is to build a school bee hotel or leave patches of bare dirt along lawn edges for wild bees to nest in. We have an unused area that I could use for this.Hi Diarmaid, sounds like a great lesson. The children would love the idea of a treasure hunt – it will help engage them in learning. The children also love looking at their school on Google Maps!
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
First, we will look at our school yard on Google Maps using the classroom interactive board to see how it looks from above. Then we will go outside. Each group gets a basic drawing of the yard, a clipboard, and a clear polypocket. The children will walk around and use markers to draw different things on their polypocket.
We will map these simple variables:
Sunny and shady spots in the yard
Green spaces like grass, big trees, or bushes
Mini-beasts, marking where we find bugs or birdsBack in the classroom, the groups will layer their polypockets on top of each other to see how they mix. We can then look at the National Biodiversity Data Centre maps online to see pictures of the bugs and frogs found in our local area.
I will finish by questioning the children by asking qs such as ‘Did we find more bugs in the shady places or the sunny places?” and “Why do you think the birds stay near the trees?”
I agree that the practical examples of lessons are very useful along with the easy ways of incorporating STEM into the classroom.
Having reviewed the paper Unravelling STEM: Beyond the Acronym of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths (Liston 2018), I have reflected on what STEM education looks like in my classroom. I have neglected engineering at times and have been guilty of thinking ‘STEM Activities’ with the children exploring is ticking the box when that is all it is at times and not always beneficial. I am hoping I will be able to use some new ideas in this course in my teaching in September.
