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Hi Cassandra
Welcome to the course. I am glad to see that Maeve Liston’s paper has inspired you to think more about STEM as something that can permeate throughout your lessons rather than being a collection of standalone subjects. It is great that you are already using technology with your students. Hopefully this course will provide you with lots of ideas and inspire you to approach STEM in a more integrated way.
Hi Helen
It’s great that you can use a local bridge as a stimulus for your bridge building project. As the bridge is local to your school, you should consider bringing the children to the bridge rather than just using photographs as this will emphasise the real life aspect. The fact that it is a foot bridge should make it easier for the children to walk across it and maybe estimate and measure the width of the bridge and estimate its height. These examples of practical maths in a real life setting would then help to inspire the measurements and calculations for their own model bridges.
Hi Ryan
Welcome to the course. I like your plans for building a sundial in school and especially involving pupils in the design process and choosing suitable materials. Perhaps some smaller individual sundials could be made first to start the process. By choosing the designs and materials for their smaller sundials and seeing which ones work well, they could then transfer their findings to the design of a larger one. As you said there are so many cross curricular opportunities here and also many opportunities for STEM skills development, with the engineering design process, assessing their own work and recording and communicating results.
Hi Monica
Urban foxes are one of the many consequences of our lack of care for Biodiversity in Ireland. As more and more wild spaces are cultivated or built on, there are few places for wildlife to exist and so they end up being stuck in urban environments. It is great that you are hoping to introduce soem dark sky friendly lighting and not only make your own urban space more biodiversity friendly but also help to spread awareness to local businesses and homes.
Hi Robyn
It’s great that you are already teaching the children in your class about Climate Change and encouraging them to think about our impact on our planet and that you are finding useful resources in this course to support you in this. It is great to have simple resources such as the Paxi video that make the science around greenhouse gases and Climate Change accessible to a younger audience. Hands on activities such as weather observation combined with the weather vs climate activity from module 1 and the digital models such as the Teal Tool bring all that knowledge together and connect their everyday weather observations with the broader topic of climate and climate change
Hi Ellen
Welcome to the course. Using the heritage of the children in the class or places that people have travelled to is a great idea for introducing the topic of climate zones. This could lead to great discussions and understanding, particularly if you send children home to discuss it with their parents and feed back to the class. Recording the weather is always a great hands on activity. It is simple to set up and easily understandable and accessible for all ages and abilities but also leads to some great understanding and skills development with a great practical maths component.
Hi Caitriona
Welcome to the course. It’s great that this module has given you inspiration for increasing the amount of STEM work that you do in your classroom. Hopefully you will find the rest of the activities and resources useful in increasing your own confidence with the subject and helping you to find the time through integration with other subjects. Recording the weather is a great place to start with practical STEM work as it is relatively straightforward but involves so many useful STEM skills. I love the idea of the daily weather broadcast over the intercom. I’m sure the children will love taking their turns at this activity and it will really increase their confidence and communication skills.
Hi Marie-Anne
You have some great ideas for project work based around the Paxi video and understanding the Greenhouse Effect and Climate Change. You have some great examples of cross curricular links. I love the idea of the case study. Mary Robinson’s book Climate Justice might be a good source of inspiration here or you will find many other examples online as well as examples of young people taking positive action.
Hi Ciara
Welcome to the course and I’m glad you are finding the resources useful. Earth Under the Lid is a lovely simple and practical way to demonstrate the Greenhouse effect especially when combined with the Paxi animation. If you have a greenhouse or polytunnel in the school, this is a nice way to continue with this idea but if not, there are many small pop-up greenhouses available that can be placed over a vegetable bed or planter and putting a thermometer into a covered bed and an uncovered one can be a nice way of scaling up this investigation, particularly if you use max-min thermometers, available in most garden centres, to show how the greenhouse holds on to the heat
Hi Padraig
This is a really interesting research question. It is clear and precise and related to a local climate issue. I feel, however that it would be difficult to assess the changes on a scientific level unless you have previously gathered data on biodiversity in your school grounds. This is actually one of the reasons that the National Biodiversity Data Centre was https://biodiversityireland.ie/ was set up. We know that Biodiversity in Ireland is suffering great losses due to Climate Change and many other reasons, but without sufficient data it is difficult to quantify those changes. Your idea for recoding biodiversity in your school and also noting things like waterlogged soil etc is a great one, but you might consider making this your year one of the project or baseline survey. You could set out a number of parameters such as the time of flowering of a few plants in your school, the timing of bud burst on trees, the appearance of a few insect species (butterflies are a good indicator species and relatively easy to identify) or the type of birds found in the school grounds. I don’t know what class you are teaching but lets say 4th class were to take on this survey then each year, the new 4th class could survey using the same parameters and gradually build up the data over a number of years. Also if you got the children involved in submitting some of their finds to the National Biodiversity Data Centre, or the Birdwatch Ireland Garden Bird Survey, the children could also contribute to national databases as Citizen Scientists
Hi Claire
That sounds like a very comprehensive plan for a mapping project incorporating all the elements of outdoor observation and exploration, map making with the key features of direction, scale, symbols and a key and the integration of digital technology. I love the idea of using Google My Maps to create thematic layers. It’s something I must explore more myself as my experience of this has so far extended only to creating maps of sites to visit on holidays in Ireland. Using their experience of creating and exploring maps of their area to consider deeper questions about land use, settlement and planning is a great way to round out the lesson.
Hi Fiona
The Barrow Viaduct in Borris would provide great inspiration for a project on bridges as it is a prominent feature of the landscape in that part of Carlow. As a former railway bridge, there would also be lovely history and geography links to transport in Ireland through looking at the construction of the railway system in Ireland and exploring both the course of the River Barrow navigation and the contrast between the past and present rail networks in Ireland. If it could be visited as part of a school trip, the walkway over and under the viaduct would be a fantastic experience for the pupils to tie in with their project work or it could be a suggested as a family trip for some of your pupils.
Hi Kevin
A discussion on Biodiversity is a good place to start. Depending on what they have covered in school in the past, you may find that knowledge about local wildlife is limited, but comparing notes on what they do know will help children to get started on the topic. I love that you are combining information gathered on local wildlife with data in maths and also mapping what you find. It would be good then to show the children some of the Biodiversity data gathered for their local area and look at some of the species maps on https://biodiversityireland.ie/ and to make links between what they are doing and the work of the National Biodiversity Data Centre. You could even get the children involved in some Citizen Science biodiversity recording to add their finds to the national database.
Hi Edel
You are not alone in not being aware of the impacts of light pollution. It is something that few people think about and as a result, the problem is increasing at an alarming rate. Your ideas for raising awareness among your learners and getting them involved in simple surveys and activities in school and at home can really help to spread awareness. Encouraging the student council to engage with your local authority is a great way of demonstrating active citizenship. Many local authorities are starting to tackle the issue of light pollution now and public engagement and awareness will be a very important part of that.
Hi Irene
That sounds like a lovely activity on designing a Dark Sky Park. I love the idea of the role play stations with dress up props such as animal masks to help children get into character and a choice of ways for the children to present their ideas to the class. The idea of using the torch to illustrate the idea of suitable and unsuitable lights is simple but I’m sure it would be very effective. 12-15 minutes seems quite short for an art activity for a junior class but I like the idea of each group designing one aspect of the Dark Sky Park and displaying them all together and then tying everything together with reflection and a song.
