[Orla McGrath]

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.

[Orla McGrath]

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.

 

[Orla McGrath]

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!

[Orla McGrath]

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 birds

Back 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?”

[Orla McGrath]

I agree that the practical examples of lessons are very useful along with the easy ways of incorporating STEM into the classroom.

[Orla McGrath]

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.

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