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I think the absolute best way to be successful in my teaching of our heritage is to use a multi-disciplinary approach. We need to give children the opportunities to engage in the learning in the learning style that best suits their acquisition of knowledge. For some children art and conscruction works brilliantly. Perhaps this is in consctructing a bridge, drawing or painting a local bridge or point of interest or responding to photographs and images such a aerial photos or maps. For others they love to be dramatic, to act out a scene reflective of the history of our local reference area or of the life of a famous scientist we have discusses. Some children love to listen to music, to compose to develop a sense of rhythm and timing to they would associate with the lyrics telling a story being told. Creative writing, I would use as an excellent assessment tool. Children could write a newspaper article, a narrative, a powerpoint project to reflect their learning and pass on their knowledge for assessment or for teaching their peers or younger children. The more holistic our approach to exploring our scientifi heritage, the greater the scope for children to assimilate the information and to share their knowledge with others. It allows them to bring the heritage to life in a real way to them.
This could be done by dividing the children into groups where they attach the learning in one of the appraches listed above, either individually or in teams. We can have an art station, a composing sttaion, a reporters desk and an improvisiation corner. It would be fun and engaging.The suspension bridge in Birr Castle Dimense is such a wonderful starter for a lesson on bridge building. As a whole school challenge each class could research bridges in our locality and bridges around the world as projects within teams/classes or groups. These projects would serve as the inpsiration for our own bridge construction challenges. The younger classes would enjoy having projects completed by the older classes presented to them as their inspirations.
looking again at Birr Castle suspension bridge we would start the wonderings….how was it built?, what was it over? how was it given stength? what could i use to make a suspension bridge of my own? how could I strengthen my bridge? What does my bridge need to support? How will it achieve this? Will I use paper, card, toilet rolls or other resources? how can we connect the bridge to a road?
Having wondering and thought about their design, each class or group could draw a plan of their proposed bridge.
And now we are off, constructing, engineering and testing our designs.
Having tested the designs it is time to evaluate the success or suggested improvements needed as well as evaluating their experiences of being engineers.To conduct a seasonal biodiversity project to run throughout the school year, I think we would use lots of the resources outlined in this module to firstly identify what flora, fauna, trees, minibeasts and animals we have within our school garden and field.
Using some of the templates to identify such as those provided by the Tree Council of Ireland, Seek app, minibeasts searches, the wildflower walk challenge and Wild Connections the children could create a list of all that is within our school grounds. Having this information allows for us to follow the natural seasons and how they change and affect each of the plants, flowers, animals, minibeasts and trees. Having completed this profile over a 12 month period, I have no doubt that the children would be full of ideas about what needs to be added to improve our biodiversity. Is one plant dominant? Is one creature dominant? Does something need more support? is our selection touching off as many items as would be suggested to live in a grassland habitat. The wonderings will lead to the children making suggestions to improve our biodiversity and broaden the spectrum of living things in our grassland habitat.I am so excited to lead a lesson with my younger students on map making. Having used our interactive whiteboard to look at aerial photos of our school including our garden, yards and pitch, the children can join into groups to wonder how they could create a map of this outside using what they can find in nature.
They can enjoy wondering what they should use to represent the school walls, the garden, the trees, the grass areas, the yard etc.
They can chat and plan where they will create their map. Next they can have the fun of finding all of the items they have decided that they need…leaves, flowers, twigs, stones etc etc
Each group can identify what part of the yard they want to use to create their 3d map and off they go. This is such a natural way for younger children to map and to get a sense of place in our space.
On completion of their 3d maps they can choose who in their groups is the photographer. Each group can use our school tablets to take an aerial photo of their map.
On returning to the classroom using splitscreen to show their map alongside an aerial photo of the school would be fantastic. The children can then explain their maps to their peers
what a super idea to use the tablets to create an aerial image first. I am definitely going to use this idea to create a before and an after image of the childrens’ maps.
I too can relate to you saying that you tend to help out the children too much during the StEM lesson. I will definitely follow the steps laid out in this module when leading an STEM lesson.
I certainly would have begin with pre-teaching the vocabulary that we would be using in our experiments rather than allowing this information to be gained by the children during their investigation. I love the idea of the starter question. A question where they are free to predict and speculate without me making any suggestions or inferences.
Posing questions that encourage wondering during the investigating is super. …Did ? How? Would you try? which? what have you observed? what would you change? what might happen if…?
It is simply impossible for the children to interpret and internalise the information if they have not wondered, have not explored themselves, predicted, tried to investigate, tried to investigate again with different parameters and used the equipment themselves.
They cannot solve a task if they do not wonder how it works, why it works and how they can affect how it works using the equipment provided.