Urban Environment – Directed Study Task

Ayr is a fairly large town, which packs a lot of historic value, in the West of Scotland. We have many parks including Rozelle and Belliesle which are beautiful for taking walks, cycling or going for a picnic. Our town is an historic sea town with beautiful old buildings still standing to this day.  Our sea/beach is one of the most picturesque in Scotland, with a beach park, beautiful promenade and beach that goes for miles. Our River is covered by some beautiful bridges built centuries ago.  There are also 3 main golf courses in Ayr which add to the green spaces of our urban environment.

Ayr is filled with cars, buses, a large train station and many cycle paths for bikes. We often have road works dotted throughout the town as there are always problems on our roads but the standard of the roads are usually ok. In Ayrshire, lots of work places have a ‘Cycle to Work’ scheme where they get money off of a bike if they use it to cycle to work to decrease our carbon footprint and get healthy.

In Ayr there are roughly 26 primary schools. Mostly public with 1 private school – Wellington which is a nursery, primary and secondary school. There are allotment spaces in Craigie, near the University, which local schools sometime use for gardening. Carnegie Library is Ayr’s main library and is located on the Main Street near the River. It is an extremely great resource to the public in Ayr as well as local schools, students and businesses.

Ayr is ripe with work. The local council have offices in Wellington Square which is at the heart of Ayr’s town centre. We have hundreds of private businesses which range from cafes/restaurants to hairdressers/boutiques. Ayr Central is the main hub of shopping in Ayr with the likes of Debenhams, Topshop and Next. We also have many chain restaurants in Ayr (especially at Heathfield Industrial Estate) including Pizza Hut, McDonald’s, and Costa Coffee. Not necessarily in the heart of Ayr but in the outskirts and around Ayrshire there is a huge farming community which brings many jobs, services and a sense of community to a lot of people in Ayr.

Ayr biggest asset in terms of recreation spaces has to be the Gaiety Theatre. The Gaiety Theatre was built in 1902 and was recently refurbished in 2010-2012. Ayr is well known for its sport teams. There is a  2 hockey pitches at Doonside and Whitletts, which are home to Ayr Hockey Club – one of Ayr’s oldest sports club formed in 1953. Ayr Rugby Club, who play at Millbrae in Alloway, are also a key team to Ayrshire’s recreation. In Ayr we have an abundance of 3G pitches used for football, schools and other sporting teams. Whitletts & Mossblown activity centres and the citadel hall’s can all be rented for indoor sports such as badminton, squash etc.

I was shocked that Ayr’s air quality level was rated at a 3 – low, as this was higher than Glasgow city centre’s rating of 1 (Air Quality in Scotland, 2017). Ayr is a beautiful town with loads of green spaces, the river, the beach etc and not huge amounts of traffic so this did surprise me.

Task for a Primary 5 class to investigate their urban environment – first of all, I would take them on a walk around the school grounds. I would put them in groups and ask them to write down what they see, hear, feel and can touch. I would then ask them to go home that night and go a walk with their parents around their neighbourhood taking note of what they can see, feel, hear etc but also note the differences between that and the school area. We could again then set this up to do as any times as you deem fit to get a contrast, whether thats taking them to a farm or a busy town (once the trip had been risk assessed first). This allows the children to discuss the environmental impact of human activity an urbanisation (SOC 2-08a) and in groups, the children could then make a powerpoint presentation or some graphs/chats to show their findings and present to the rest of the class.

 

References:

Air Quality in Scotland, 2017. [Online] Available: www.scottishairquality.co.uk [Accessed: 28 September 2017]

Curriculum for Excellence: Social Studies Experiences and Outcomes [Online] Available:  https://www.education.gov.scot/Documents/social-studies-eo.pdf [Accessed 28 September 2017]

 

 

Learning Log – Week 1&2 (The Environment)

“The goal of sustainable development is to enable all people throughout the world to satisfy their basic needs and enjoy a better quality of life without compromising the quality of ife for future generations.” (Scottish Government, 2010, p.4)

During the first two weeks of Sustainable Development, we have learned about our environment around us and the ways in which we can teach our future classes. This module has been very useful even just after two weeks for both me as a learner and me as a student teacher. I am improving my knowledge of my environment (see urban environment task above) as well as ways I can teach my future class about their environment. Sustainable Development has loads of benefits for the child, community and global community such as making education relevant, promoting equity and respect and environmental improvements. In our ‘hands-on’ workshop, we did a variety of activities to learn about our environment, these included bark and leaf rubbings and seeing snails in their habitats. During this workshop, we also learned about child misconceptions when it comes to science and the world around us. These misconceptions were quite interesting to try and imagine where each child gets as certain misconceptions from and how, in a way, they all make sense but obviously aren’t correct. In the afternoon, we went outside to do checklists of insects, lichen and leaves. This is a perfect practice to implement in a classroom as active learning is great for children’s development and mindfulness. We also took a sensory walk around the university. This task I think would be quite hard to let young children do unsupervised as they could easily stumble off task and it may not be fully productive. The environment is not something I, as a learner, have been very interested in. However, after this topic I understand the importance of teaching children about it: to protect them, to educate them and to allow them to make good life choices that will impact positively on the environment around them.

 

List of skills I have developed throughout ‘The Environment’ topic:

• Listening
• Observing
• Analysing
• Evaluating
• Research

References:

Scottish Government (2012) Learning for Sustainaability: The Report of the One School Planet Schools working Group. Edinburgh: Scottish Government.

 

 

 

Learning Log – Week 3&4 (Climate Change)

Climate change is a big issue in our society today, therefore is a big issue in schools as we need to educate our younger generations on the world around them. As a society, we are using too much fossils fuels and creating too much carbon emissions that we cannot make up for. I believe that our generation is being left to attempt to clean up for everyone before us and I don’t think its even possible to cure our world of the damage we have already caused it. It is due to previous generations that our world is now stricter of recycling and ‘being green’ and that we have to set targets such as the 2050 Target. The 2050 target, found in the Climate Chang (Scotland) Act 2009, means that Scottish Ministers must reduce emissions to make sure the Scottish emissions account for the year 2050 is at least 80% lower than the baseline. This is a tough task, and I am skeptical as to whether we, as a country, will be able to achieve it. After reading the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009, I decided to test my own carbon footprint on the website provided. I was shocked and pretty upset that my carbon footprint is a massive 165%. This demonstrates that although I recycle here and there and walk when I can other than drive, I, as an individual,  am NOT doing enough to help our environment. I hope to implant some more changes to reduce my footprint further but the most useful thing I could do to help our plant, as a teacher, is to educate younger generations not to make the same mistake. If children as taught from school age to recycle, walk or cycle places, and look after our planet then as they grow older, it will be like second nature to them.

A big question posed to us during this topic was ‘Should teachers teach about climate change?’. There are many reasons for and against but some of the reasons we came up with were:

• We don’t want to scare them therefore maybe climate change is a topic for older children and you have to be careful, as a teacher, how you phrase the topic.
• It is important to give children awareness of their surroundings and things happening in the world around them.
• Again, we highlighted the importance of what words you use depending on the age group.

Our workshops today were highly useful in terms of us as earners but maybe not so much for us as teachers. I felt the ‘Climate Change and Politics’ workshop was useful in ways of researching, collating information, working in groups but for looking at climate change, especially for children – I felt it was too mature and quite tricky! If I was to give it as a task for children, I would print them off specific information for their person/area so they just had to pick out the important parts and present them other than having to find everything from scratch as even for us as students, it was difficult!

The science workshop was quite fun today, however, there was too much going on for a class of young children. I enjoyed the research task at the start looking at the different Biomes if we were to survive a plane crash but again, I feel this would only work with mature students and you would have to give them resources to help find the information. The different tasks in the science workshop after were all useful, fun and kids would enjoy them but some tasks would require supervision so they would need a TA to assist if there were other groups working at the same time or the class teacher could demonstrate for everyone and not actually let the pupils get involved. The science workshop showed us the different sub-topics we could teach children under climate change which were:

• Water cycle
• Global warming
• Agriculture
• Water level
• Ice cap

After this topic, I am still undecided on whether climate change should be taught to children or not and how to approach it in a way that doesn’t bring up the devastation it causes every year or the maturity of it as a topic. My knowledge and skills have improved a lot after this topic but I will research further before our assignment on ways I would like to teach my class about it and at what age I feel appropriate.

List of skills I have developed through the Climate Change topic:

• Research
• Record
• Report
• Analysing
• Writing

 

References:

http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/home/calculator_complete [Accessed 7th October 2017]

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/asp/2009/12/contents [Accessed 9th October 2017]

 

 

Learning Log – Week 5&6 (Interdependence)

Interdependence was a highly interesting and fun topic! Interdependence is the way in which two or more living things depends on each other to grow and remain healthy. For our first week of this topic, we went to visit two farms! I have a lot of friends who are farmers and I am no stranger to outdoors and getting my hands dirty but my favourite thing about the farm visits was the contrast between the two farms.  I always remember the best school trips where the outdoorsy ones like farms, country parks etc. and I think a farm visit for a class, at any age, would be very useful to their learning of interdependence under sustainable development. What is even better for teachers nowadays in that The Royal Highland Education Trust (RHET) provides tonnes of resources and services around farm visits and can assist with planning, including risk assessments, making our lives as teachers so much easier! Although, our 2 weeks of Interdependence were hands on and involved a lot of learning, I think it would be quite hard to teach in a classroom. The best thing would be to take the children out to see what we’re talking about and give them that experience like we had by going to a farm.

 

List of skills I have developed through Interdependence topic:

• Observing
• Critical Writing
• Technology
• Working with others

 

Directed Study Task – Interdependence

 

Learning Log – Week 7&8 (Disasters)

 

Our micro-teaching task for disasters was extremely beneficial for this topic. After deciding our groups and being given our area of the ‘Disasters’ topic (ours was Earthquakes), we then had to creat a presentation with the definition, cause, prevention, recovery, response and how we would teach it in a classroom. Our group worked really hard to come up with as many original ideas for teaching earthquakes in a classroom and it was especially beneficial to see other groups ideas for their specific disaster as well.

 

Overall this group presentation helped me develop my sense of confidence as a student teacher as public speaking in front of a group of your peers is much harder than a group of children and its something I sometimes struggle with so this gave me a push to practise. It also helped me develop my research skills when researching my specific area. It helped with communication and group work as we all had to work together to split up the task then collaborate at the end so it gelled together.  I also improved on using my ‘teacher head’ as we had to think of different ways we could explain earthquakes to children and merge that cross-curricular into areas like drama, art and science which although challenging, was really rewarding and will help with placement after Christmas.

 

Learning Log (Week 9&10) – Energy

During the first week of our ‘Energy’ topic, we did a lot of science based activities. These included:

• creating energy with a balloon.
• using circuits.
• creating dinosaurs (relating to fossil fuels)

While this was very enjoyable, not all of these activities would be practical in a large classroom of children, depending on their age range. Some may be better done as a demonstration or a small supervised group in order to create a safe, yet fun, learning environment.

Our task in week 10, was to create an anemometer by following an instruction sheet and then create a lesson plan surrounding this activity. This was enjoyable as it was practical but also got us properly thinking about it in a classroom situation. However, we had never done any lesson planning (properly) before so we were kind of thrown in the deep end, but I’m fairly certain most group managed okay and had some sort of lesson at the end of the task.

 

This topic helped me as a learner to improve my knowledge of energy, in preparation for teaching a class. As a learner, it also allowed me to work in a group effectively and communicate amongst my peers to effectively complete the tsk/science based activity.  As a student teacher, it allowed me to use my initiative to create a lesson plan and to imagine every activity in a classroom situation to see if it would be practical or not.

 

Sustainable Development Serial Day Tasks

 

 

During my time on placement, I witnessed plenty of evidence of existing engagement with sustainable education. The school have an Eco Committee with at least one pupil from every class involved. The Eco Committee are in charge of the school allotment (off school property) which pupils are frequently taken to in order to plant vegetables and plants and learn about the sustainability of growing fruit, vegetables and plants. Every classroom has a recycling bin as well as an ordinary one and pupils are encouraged to use it as much as possible, when necessary. Every class participate in the daily mile to help promote an active and healthy lifestyle. There is also evidence of outdoor and active learning on the walls with the nursery and younger classes decorating paper plates with leaves and other materials found outdoors.

Considering the actual play space available for the children and its suitability, in my opinion, I would say it is very good. Although the main playground area is tarmacked, the school do have a grass area, a football pitch and a climbing frame for the children to get more out of their playtime.  I would say their playground is of a decent standard compared to some other schools who maybe don’t even have grass but there is not a huge allowance for development and challenge.

After discussing learning for sustainability with my class, it is clear that they do not know as much as I just thought. Although they use the recycling bin, some of the children did not understand its purpose or why they use it, it’s just habit that they do. I found this quite interesting that they are in a habit that the do not fully understand. In terms of the eco committee and the allotment – most children understand the purpose of the allotment to grow their own crops and to be able to sustain themselves but not everyone had physically experienced going to the allotment so they maybe did not possess a full understanding. Finally, when asking my P4 class about anything they knew about climate change or the environment – I was met with many puzzled looks. One child asked if it was something to do with the weather? Which was as close as anyone got so unfortunately there is much room for improvement there.

If a stranger or parent was walking through the school halls, they would see heaps of evidence of learning for sustainability and a knowledge and understanding of it, however on closer inspection this does not fully seem the case. A ‘next step’ for the school, or at least my class, would be to develop every child’s knowledge and understanding of all things sustainable other than just the older children or just the children on the eco committee.