[Una Halpin]

Hi Brenda

I love the idea of the Climate Awareness Day where children get to showcase their weather data and any investigations or design and make projects related to climate and climate change.  They could also showcase what they have learned from using the Teal tool by deciding what way they want to represent the information. The showcase could have examples of posters, creative writing pieces and dramas, as well as the practical activities they have done. This Climate Awareness Day could be your STEM showcase for Step 5 of the Curious Minds awards.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Joseph

This is s nice plan that focusses on owls, bats and other nocturnal creatures with progression from learning about owls and bats, to assessing the habitat, identifying threats and seeing what could be improved and then focussing on solutions. I love the idea of having the children make bat boxes in class and finding suitable locations to place them. Perhaps some of the children might have suitable locations at home and parents who would be willing to install them as well as placing some near the school.

[Una Halpin]

Hi David

That sounds like a lovely seasonal plan based around the FIT count. It would be worth doing some lessons over winter or early spring to help the children learn about the main groups of pollinators and how to identify them before they begin their FIT counts. You will find all the resources and lesson plans on https://pollinators.ie/schools/. For your FIT counts, you may not be able to use the same garden patch each month as the type of flowers that are blooming will vary from month to month. For example, you might be using Dandelions in April and Clover in May or June. You can use some flowering herbs or garden flowers, if you don’t have patches of any of the target wild flowers. It would also be a nice idea for different groups of pupils to use different types of flowers so you can draw your own conclusions about which types support more pollinators.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Colm

That sounds like a lovely cross curricular project centred around features of the local natural and built environment. It would tie in very nicely with your previous engineering project around arches and the construction of St Mel’s Cathedral. Having guest speakers who were involved in the reconstruction of the Cathedral is a lovely idea if you can get them as reconstruction of a historic building is very specialised work with an integration of history and engineering. Exploring seasonal Biodiversity along the river is a lovely extension. I would encourage you to invest in some identification books, chart sand swatches for identifying plants and animals or print out some free resources. While apps are a nice back-up for teachers to cross check identification, or as a little reminder, they are best used when you already have some knowledge. I would never recommend them for use by children as there is no real learning involved in the use of an app. With a book or key, the children have to use their observation skills to pick out distinguishing features and read notes on sizes, location and season and these skills can help in identifying similar plants or animal at a later date.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Niamh

Encouraging children to look at the moon at home early in the morning before school and then studying it in school once they get in to school is a nice idea. If even some children were able to look each morning, they could report back to the class on what they saw. You might even split the class into 5 groups and ask each child to try to view the moon early one specific morning of the week. Doing the recording in class as a follow up would be a great way to include everyone, so that those who didn’t have time in the morning could still do their observations.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Jovana

Welcome to the course. That sounds like a comprehensive and well structured lesson plan for studying the movement of the sun with your class. I like the idea of a large poster to stick the photos too and with space for their observations, so they have a record with everything in one place and can compare the different positions at different times of day and use it as a basis for understanding the Earth’s rotation. The sundials would feed in nicely with this too.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Niamh

That sounds like a great lesson plan on map making, which makes great use of the resources in this module. I have recently done the map layers activity with a number of groups and discovered that Mr Price do A4 pads of tracing paper that work really well for layering over a base map printed from openstreetmaps.ie.  I get the children to draw around the frame of the base map onto the tracing paper so it can be placed back again very easily if it happens to move and mark the features such as building outlines etc. I like the idea of comparing their own maps to the satellite view to see what features are easier to spot from the air and which are easier to spot from the ground.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Brian

As you have outlined here, it is great to be able to combine learning about greenhouse gases and the effects of Climate Change through videos, online data and classroom investigations with practical activities to reduce our own impact.  Biodiversity projects such as tree planting and looking after pollinators are a great way to get children engaged with appreciating and looking after the Earth that sustains us. Energy audits are also a great idea to identify actions that can make a difference

[Una Halpin]

Hi David

That sounds like a great whole school project. I like the idea of dividing the school grounds on the basis of how welcoming each area would be for wildlife and identifying the issues that might exist for nocturnal animals by using the bat and moth game other activities to help explain the barriers to moving and feeding. Giving each class responsibility for a particular part of the school grounds is a great idea. That way the children could come up with ideas and research their chosen action and lots of little improvements could be made for biodiversity without any class having to take on too much. Having a before and after Biodiversity map would be a lovely visual way to showcase what you have done at your Dark Skies family evening and a great way to inspire similar action in pupils’ homes.

[Una Halpin]

Hi David

Radio waves can be a difficult enough concept, but you have some lovely ideas for simple easy to follow hands on investigations that can really make it accessible to your pupils. Tuning forks are always a hit especially when seeing how sounds waves travel through water and using prisms or water to study the refraction of light is another simple idea with a big visual impact.  I love the idea of the creative challenge to design a space listening device.  especially the communication part where groups explain how their device might work.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Kate

Welcome to the course. I like the idea of building your monthly theme around a STEM topic.  There are so many ways to integrate other subjects with a STEM theme and you have some really nice ideas there. I supposed I am a bit biased coming from a Science background and being involved with delivering teacher CPD for Curious Minds for many years, but I often recommend to teachers that if they are looking for ideas for cross curricular themes, they should start with a STEM topic or even a single investigation and build around that. Hopefully the other modules of this course will give you plenty of ides for STEM themes and ideas for integration with subjects across the curriculum.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Carmel

I love your perspective on the videos in this module. As well as the messages on Climate Change, the videos can also be used for other purposes. I love the idea of the Listen and Draw exercise. It would be really interesting to see the children’s interpretations of the score, especially if you used contrasting parts such as where the beauty of the Earth is shown and where the focus is on human destruction.  Greta Thunberg’s discussion of her Autism is a great way of introducing discussion on diversity but also a nice way to open up discussions about why some people see the problem of Climate Change more clearly while others dismiss it

[Una Halpin]

Hi Lauren

That is a great question as it is based on a local climate issue and relates to the children’s everyday lives. I like the way you have framed the question to include the children’s parents. As climate change is measured over a period of 30 years or more, it is good to have a longer reference period that just the children’s own limited experience. They will of course have personal experience of extreme weather events such as storm Eowyn, which have become much more common. Doing their own weather collection and keeping weather diaries is a great way to help them understand how weather and climate data are collected and some comparisons between their own short term data and long term online data would really help with their understanding of the differences between weather and climate and the effects of climate change.

[Una Halpin]

Hi Sharon

That sounds like a lovely local investigation. I like the way you have started with a general question and then aim to define the focus of the question through discussion and debate and local exploration. Using the children’s own experiences is a good start but as their personal frame of reference is so narrow, it would be good to include discussions with parents and grandparents and comparing their recollections with actual past weather data. I didn’t know until quite recently that there was such a thing as meteorological seasons and it was even later when I learned that astronomical seasons are defined by the equinoxes and solstices.  We only ever learned about the traditional Irish seasons when I was in school and it never made sense to me as a child that February was in spring and August was autumn. Meterological seasons make much more sense to me in terms of the weather, and reflect what I always thought the seasons should be, although I do now have more of an understanding and an appreciation for the old Celtic Calendar which I never heard much about in school. It would be a fascinating cross curricular study to delve a bit further into this topic as it would combine history, geography and science. This is Met Eireann’s description of the seasons https://www.met.ie/meteorological-spring-begins-wednesday-1st-march-2023 https://www.met.ie/meteorological-spring-begins-wednesday-1st-march-2023

[Una Halpin]

Hi Carolann

That sounds like a lovely investigation rooted in a local environmental issue. I love that there is a clear path for investigation in recording the types of litter and the amount of each. You also have a plan for taking action and relating the litter found to people’s actions. You could also relate the local litter problem to the wider global problem of plastic pollution. Many people are very concerned about ocean plastic without considering the source of that plastic so it would be nice to emphasis to your pupils that by taking action at a local level with the nearby stream, they are helping to reduce ocean plastic.  It might be nice to show the children the story of Boyan Slat who started investigating solutions to ocean plastic when he was just 16 years old and soon after, started his company The Ocean Clean-Up https://theoceancleanup.com/boyan-slat/. You could also look into how plastic is made and make the link between climate change and plastic waste, to show the children that every effort they can make to reduce plastic waste will decrease greenhouse gas emissions.

 

 

 

 

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