[Una Halpin]

Hi Claire

Welcome to the course and thanks for your detailed reflection on STEM practice in your classoom. It is great that you are already incorporating practical lessons and that you have a strong focus on STEM skills. Hopefully this course will support you in the areas you have identified for improvement in your own teaching, particularly in the areas of inquiry based investigations and projects and a greater involvement with the wider community.

Just a word on posting. When typing your responses elsewhere and then posting into the forum, right click on the response window before pasting and choose paste as plain text. This removes the extra formatting which can make your reply difficult to read.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Ruth

Welcome to the course and thanks for your thoughts on STEM integration and the activities in this module. It is great that the play based approach in your infant classroom leads to natural exploration and STEM integration and this approach can work well at senior levels too. I live the idea of a Junior infants weather station in the school grounds and encouraging interest at home through sharing their work on Google Classroom. You might even have a network of little weather stations in children’s homes as a result. As you said, weather recording has the potential to involve the whole school at different levels with each group working at their own level and sharing of information and collaboration between different classes. The ESERO resources Class Weather Station and Strong Air introduce more complex meterorological concepts such as air pressure and humidity for older classes

[Una Halpin]

Hi Jane

I am glad that you liked the activities and tools presented in this module and can see their relevance to your third class. Tying in to local issues is always a great idea as it helps dispel the myth that Climate Change is something that happens far away and makes it relevant to the children. A hands on approach always helps to make learning more relevant and by gathering their own weather data, children can understand where the online data comes from and how temperature scientists use the date gathered in the past to predict future temperatures. The idea of looking at your local village and considering the future effects of Climate Change is a great idea and you might also have them think about any past or present effects, such as flooding or unpredictable weather making farming more difficult.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Bernie

Your approach of starting with a recap on Climate Change and a discussion on the local issues is very important. Children should understand what Climate Cahneg is and how it affects us in our daily lives if we want them to conneect with the issue. I have been to so many classes where the children can list off all the things we can do to save energy and reduce the affects of Climate Change but very few understand why we need to do this. This initial discussion about issues can then lead to specific questions and getting the children to come up with the research question is a very good idea. Different groups could come up with questions and then bring them to the class for general discusion about suitability. Looking at past weather and climate data and then tying it in to how changing patterns affect the children and their families directly is a nice idea.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Kaytlyn

Welcome to the course. I am glad that you liked the activities in the first module and have considered ways to implement them in your class. It is always good to look at ways to incorporate IT tools such as excel spreadsheets to dispaly results and mentimeter is a great way to quickly gather information from children about their understanding or prior knowledge of a topic and to share that information with the rest of the class.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Hazel

That is a great Climate Detectives question as it has a clear focus and is very relevant to the children’s lives. It is an issue for many schools as traffic builds up leading to congestion and a decrease in air quality. You may find this information from SEAI useful. https://www.seai.ie/data-and-insights/seai-statistics/transport. If pupils calculate the length of their journey to school and take an average emissions figure from the graph Carbon Intensity of New Cars, they can actually work out the carbon emissions related to theri journey to school.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Christine

That is a lovely way to introduce the concept of light pollution to younger pupils. It is a great way to involve parents by asking the children to observe the night sky at home and see how many stars they can count. I really love the idea of using their discoveries to creat a map with stickers and felt which really helps to make the concept real to them. It would be great to get the children involved in designing a simple recording sheet to take home so that they are using the same tools for assessing the night sky. Following up with drawings to encourage parnents to turn off outside lights is a great way to finish the project. As parents will have been involved in the earlier observations, children will have kept them informed of what they were doing in class, which might encourage parents to think more about their own use of artificial light at night.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Emma

How lucky you are to live in one of the few dark sky areas where light pollution is less of an issue. I camped in Mannix Point last August and I was really looking forward to looking up at the night sky and seeing a wide range of stars. We did miss the Perseid  Meteor showers as it was too cloudy most nights, but I still managed to appreciate the darkness.  I love your ideas for exploring light pollution through looking at photos, discussion, building Lego models and animla role play and also the integration with technology and citizen science through use of Stellarium and the Globe at Night. It sounds like a great way to engage the children with the topic.

[Una Halpin]

Hi John

That sounds like a great seasonal Biodiversity project and I love that you plan to take the children outdoors at least once a month to keep track of seasonal changes. It is great that you have considered the need to go out more often at certain times of year when there is a lot happenign as this will give the children the opportunity to notice details such as which flowers bloom first in spring and which trees are first to lose their leaves in autumn which will really give them a sense of familiarity with their school grounds. I love the idea of using a iPads technologies to both photograph findings and create their nature journals and the addition of drawings and written descriptions will really help to flesh these out. You might also consider the addition of some creative writing pieces such as stories and poetry inspired by what they seeas well as the descriptive journal entries.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Pat

That sounds like a fantastic project using William Dargan as inspiration. I love how you have incorporated the map reading aspect into the project, with pupils needing to consider the route and other stops along the way and also the obstacles and land use. They might also look at a historical map of Ireland’s railways to compare the original rail network with today’s network. I like that the project could also incorporate engineeering design when thinking about how to overcome obstacles such as roads or rivers. It is also a good way for pupils to begin to think about how infrastructure projects are planned and developed and the various factors such as people and biodiversity that need to be considered.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Fiona

Welcome to the course. It is great that you found the resources in this module so useful and I really like your ideas for adding to the lesson with local examples, videos and quizzes to ensure that the pupils engage with the content. Adding digital apps to the practical weather measurements would really add another dimension to the activity especially the use of more than one ap. I have found the Met Eireann ap to be very accurate most of the time whereas other people swear by other aps so it would be good to do a comparsion between the aps and relate them to your own findings.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Amanda

That’s a great question and you have covered many elements in your plan for the lesson that really fit well with the Climate Detectives approach. I love the idea of creating the model of the water cycle to start with. You should look up Water cycle in a Bag. You’ll find lots of examples of this activity online, where children create their own working model of the water cycle in a ziploc bag which can be attached to the window. The “what if” scenarios are a fantastic idea, especially the fact that they are created by the children themselves to aid class discussion and that you intend referencing  the local Climate Action Plan.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Jacqui

I love that question and I really like the way you have 5 different aspects of the benefits of trees for the children to research in groups. Adding some practical investigations to each topic would be good, such as using thermometers to take surface temperatures under trees and in the open, bottle soils ersion tests or conducting simple air pollution test such as this one from ESA  https://www.esa.int/SPECIALS/Eduspace_Global_EN/SEMIHL0SAKF_0.html would also add a practical dimension to the activity and add interest when the pupils present theri work to others.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Niall

That sounds like a lovely Climate Detectives project. I love your plan to give ownership to the children by asking them to first research the vocubulary around climate change and share their findings with the class and then to make and use their own rain gauges. Asking them to predict the monthly rainfall in advance of gathering their own data and after looking at the trends for the same month in previous years adds a new dimension and really gets them thinking about the difference between weather and climate and how our climate is changing.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Marie

It is great that you find the Paxi video so useful and it is so important that children are able to understand terms such as greenhouse gases and global warming and explain them to others.  This will help them to be better informed about the actual issues and the science behind them and hopefully able to resist being swayed by the wealth of climate misinformation and disinformation. I find that vocabulary is best introduced in a practical way that helps children to understand concepts while learning the language. The Earth Under the Lid resource is a really good way to explain the greenhouse effect as the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere do the same job as the glass / plastic in the greenhouse. This can also be really well illustrated if your school has a greenhouse or poytunnel. Encouraging children to present their learning and their ideas for action to other classes or the student council is a great idea as is use of iPad time to explore the TEAL tool.

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