We are now working on our 5th Green School theme, Biodiversity.
Here is our up to date habitat map, made by 5th and 6th Class. It shows where we have found different plant and animal species in the school grounds.
We have written a Green School Code. Pupils, Parents and Teachers helped with this.
Green School Code – Biodiversity
L isnafunchin is our Green School’s name
I n this school saving wildlife is our aim
Save the plants and our native trees
Nothing should harm them, help them please!
Animals and birds need their homes
For Goodness sake, leave their habitats alone.
Understand the Earth’s not just ours
No! It belongs to creatures, plants and flowers.
Cutting down trees?! Don’t be silly!
Help us to save Biodiversity!
In destroying habitats we do our Earth harm
Now our song today raises the alarm!
We recorded a song version of this in class, helped by Fr O Gorman
Newsletter: We have produced a newsletter for all parents telling them what Biodiversity is, and we inform them of some of the projects we did at school during the past two years. The following links are for the two pages of the Newsletter.
This is a picture of Mark from ‘Green Bee Education’ with our Senior Class. Mark came to tell us about how important bees are for Biodiversity and he also took us around the school grounds to look at some of the plants and insects we have.
As we went along we decided what activities we would like to do, and we wrote a Green School Action Plan, which you can see by clicking on this link
One of the things we did was to sow more trees in the school. We chose to sow fruit trees as they will attract bees and other insects to the school grounds. Monica Conroy and John Brennan helped us with this project.
To help remind ourselves of the previous themes in the Green School programme we wrote a song with our parish priest called ‘EcoFriendly in Kilkenny’ and made a video of it
Eileen Canny visited the school and helped us identify the mini-beasts in our school
Here are the Junior Infants in our ‘wildflower garden’.
Tree Planting: Click on the following link to see our pupils wishing the new fruit trees a ‘Happy Birthday!’
Biodiversity Survey
We asked our pupils 4 questions to do with Biodiversity in 2013, before we started working on the theme, and we asked the same 4 questions in 2015, after working on the theme. The results show that now a lot more pupils know about the issues around Biodiversity. The areas in Blue are the areas that show pupils who answered the questions correctly, and you can see a big difference between the two surveys.
The 4 questions were:
1. What is Biodiversity?
2. Give 3 reasons why Biodiversity is so important?
3. List three threats to Biodiversity.
4. List three ways in which we can help Biodiversity.
2013 Survey.
2015 Survey
