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In teaching the topic if Greenhouse Gases, I would begin with a whole-class KWL chart to establish prior knowledge and to set a focus for the learning.
I would then show the Paxi video and follow it with a class discussion. It’s important to note at this point that I have been very aware of children’s anxiety around the area of global warming and the climate crisis in the last number of years. While it is crucial that children are educated, I feel it is very important to place the focus and emphasis on the ways in which the earth can be healed and to ensure they understand that Climate Change and Global Warming are reversible phenomena. David Attenborough’s documentary illustrates this perfectly. I am unsure at this point whether I would use the prediction and simulation tool before or after showing David Attenborough’s documentary. However, I do know that I would be very mindful of keeping the focus of the lesson proactive and positive.I agree completely about our education in the 80s and 90s. Perhaps it was school specific, as I can see from another reply that not everyone had the same experience, but my experience seems to have been similar yo yours. No need for Aistear or STEM activities. We simply played, created, explored, devised solutions to problems, as did our teachers. Everything was repurposed or redesigned and all waste had a use. We could learn so much from those experiences and bring them with us.
Activity 1:
STEM is an area I have skirted around for many years, inadvertently or intentionally incorporating aspects of it into my SESE lessons without fully understanding what the objective of ‘STEM’ was. Liston’s 2018 paper addresses this and hits the nail on the head when it says that we often teach Science or Maths or even Science and Maths but without the presence of Engineering, we are not truly teaching STEM. I found the flow graph pictorial representation of the EDP particularly insightful and helpful and I intend using it as a focus for STEM lessons in the future.
Activity 2:
The ESA lessons are very child and teacher-friendly! Well constructed and beneficial without being overly or unnecessarily complicated. I have taught various aspects of weather monitoring to all class levels throughout my teaching career but have never gone as far as to establish a dedicated Weather Station area in my school. This is something I might take on next year.
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