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In the town i live we have Bantry Tidy Towns. They do a huge amount yo support sustainability in the community. There are regular beach clean ups, planting, litter picking and odd jobs like painting touch ups to help not only make the town look better but encourage wildlife and biodiversity within the town. There is also a community garden where people can come and grow there own fruit and vegetables.
In my classroom I like to involve the children in a branch clean up every year. We also do litter picking around the school and its outskirts in order to keep our local community clean and prevent harm to nature.
We do alot of planting in the school garden. We grow many herbs such as mint, fennel, dill and parsley. We also grow lettuce and potatoes. I like to encourage the children to taste the herbs and understand how to use them in order to improve the flavour of our food. Knowledge of how to grow your own fruit and vegetables raises the children’s awareness of the importance of healthy eating, encourages sustainability but also prevents food waste which is a major problem in todays world and causes much of its pollution, contributing to the green house effect.
Yes I agree that field trips help to evoke children’s interests in sustainability and biodiversity, develops their understanding of what we can do to help it and encourages them to do their best to support the natural environment around them.
Seafood is bursting with nutrition and it is very important that we teach children of its huge nutritional benefits. It is a great source of protein, vitamin D, iodine, selenium and omega 3s which are very important for cognitive functioning and brain development. It really is a superfood.
Ireland is an island and aquaculture is one of our most important natural resources. Teaching children about the importance of seafood should be done from a very early age. We can start at the junior end of the school by talking about how good fish is for us, naming different fish and looking for shells. We can make many cross curricular links e.g. art lessons (under the sea), history (the salmon of knowledge) geography (our local community) maths (Data hamding) collecting info on people’s favourite fish and presenting on graphs and bar charts, Music (Molly Malone), as well as any many more lessons.
Children should be given opportunities to taste different fish, make simple lunch box snacks like smoked salmon wraps, tuna on crackers, etc.
In the senior end of the school children can be given the opportunity to compare nutritional values of a variety of different seafood, meat, dairy, etc and come up with meal plans and menus to suit people of a variety of activity abilities.
These are just a few ideas I have of how to incorporate the huge nutritional benefits of seafood into my teaching.
There were some great suggestions of easy and practical ideas of how to incorporate aquacultulture into the curriculum using a variety of cross curricular lessons in your post. I will definitely be incorporating it into data handling in maths.
This module really gave us an insight into how much STEM is used in the aquaculture industry.
Lessons on aquaculture can be delivered at a cross curricular level and I can really see how I would use the lessons and resources developed by the ARC to align with the STEM Education Policy statement. The ARC provide us with many hands on, child led and practical ideas on how to teach about and develop interest in aquaculture. We could start this in the junior end of the school and build on the children’s learning each year to include more evolved STEM skills and critical thinking. This should link in with the schools whole school SSE plan.
Starting with simple science lessons about aquaculture such as studying sea creatures and collecting shells in the junior end to eventually being confident map readers, sea farm planners, engineers by the end of 6th class, the opportunities to develop STEM skills in learning about aquaculture are vast.
Hi Claire. Your post was very practical, appealing and provided the children with so many opportunities to learn about and increase their knowledge of aquaculture using a variety of methods that focus on STEM.
I agree Diarmaid. I am lucky enough to teach on the coast and we treat to treat our coastlines as real life classrooms. There is so much opportunity for hands on learning from visiting the coastline, finding samples of mussels, barnacles, periwinkles and clams, receiving visits from local fishermen and entrepreneurs, tasting local fish and shellfish. We need to give the children first hand experience in order to make the biggest impact.
Aquaculture farms are placed all along the West coast of Ireland. Being from Bantry I see first hand how these farms contribute greatly to the economy of the area. These businesses provide employment in rural areas where without it many young people would have to leave the local area in search of employment. They not only provide work to people working on the factory floors but to lab technicians, marketing experts, nutritionists, electrical engineers, lorry drivers, marine biologists, just to name a few.
Providing local shops and restaurants with fresh fish is good for tourism and provides more opportunities for employment. People travel from all over to sample the fresh fish produced in the aquaculture farms and local restaurants.
Making of most of our natural resources in a sustainable way is crucial for the growth and future success of these businesses which so many towns and communities in rural Ireland depend on.Yes I also believe that the ARC is an excellent resource that evokes children’s interests in aquaculture. I also believe that its even more beneficial in the coastal regions where children have first hand experience of how aquaculture supports and provides for the local community.
I am a teacher in West Cork where aquaculture is an extremely valuable asset to the areas employment and economy. I believe that if children are exposed to learning about where their food comes from they will develop far more interest in it. We are lucky enough to live in a place that we have access to the sea and fish/shellfish should be part of our everyday diets as its so accessible. However, there is a stigma with fish (“its smelly”) that children maintain as they are not exposed or educated enough about it.
The ARC is an amazing facility that helps to educate our youth on the importance of aquculture to our health and economy. Its interactive lessons help keep children interested in the topic and motivates them to explore furthur. Aquaculture provides employment to many people in our area and employment opportunities in the area should be encouraged and promoted.
Children need to be made aware of the importance of sustainability and social licence in order to still be able to utilise this valuable natural resource that we are so lucky to have in this country.