2021 FINALISTS
SUPER JUNIOR
Guardians of the Garden
| Rochestown Educate Together National School Cork 2021-052 Super Junior |
We are going to show how easy it is to help our environment by growing a wide range of flowers that can help attract butterflies, bees and caterpillars all around our community. We will also investigate growing our own food to become more self sustainable. We hope to make a class blog to share our journey with the rest of the school and community. It would be great to inspire others in the community to follow in our footsteps.
Biodiversity
What Birds Can Teach us about Bravery
| Scoil Mhuire, Sandymount Dublin 2021-187 Super Junior |
How we became Young Environmentalists by using our time to observe nature to gain wisdom from the natural world around us.
We realised that humans can learn a lot from animals when it comes to life skills – especially during the global pandemic – and by telling their story we learned about ourselves, our environment and our planet.
When something is common – do we sometimes forget how remarkable it is?
St. Anne’s City Farm
| Dublin City Farm & Ecology Centre Dublin 2021-004 Super Junior |
St. Anne’s City farm is a community farm in Dublin run by volunteers, at the core of the farm we have a youth team who help run the farm. Promoting sustainability, animal welfare, organic growing, biodiversity, composting, etc. The youth team fund raise all year to keep the farm open to the public. This summer they ran tours to raise money for animal feed. They range in ages from 5 to 18. The team leaders being only 17yrs old.
Connecting Nature
with Wellbeing
| St. Patrick’s Primary School Galway 2021-200 Super Junior |
Our environment plays a huge role in our mental health. The healing power of nature really is limitless when it comes to feeling better about ourselves. Unfortunately, like many city centre schools, we did not think we would have the space for a garden. However, with the help of pupils, parents and staff we converted a small concrete patch into a colourful growing area built with recycled pallets, tyres and organic materials. Essentially, the children have created an outdoor classroom where they can all spend time to learn, laugh, grow and relax together.
Although many of our pupils do not have gardens at home, they brought their plants and enthusiasm home with them during the lockdowns and shared their gardening and environmental work together on Google Classroom, while enjoying all the benefits of outdoor learning. This project has given the children an awareness of the interconnectedness of the world around them and it could be said they have sown of seeds to a more mindful way of caring for the environment.
Play Your Part
| Cloghans Hill NS Galway 2021-134 Super Junior |
Play Your Part is a project to raise awareness about saving energy in the home. We believe that every little helps and small changes at home means big changes for our planet. Our interactive model house is suitable for all ages which allows us to get our message across to everybody in a fun and interesting way. We used our knowledge of coding and electronics to design a computer programme that links to a fun model house. Most of the materials required for this project are recycled or upcycled items we had at home so as to keep our carbon footprint low.
How Trees Support
our Wellbeing
| English National School Galway 2021-011 Super Junior |
Two years ago we planted our own forest at our school with our parents for future generations to play and learn under. Now, these trees need to be cared for so that they can continue to nurture us. We plan to investigate and learn more about how we can best look after them and the soil around them. Through caring for these trees, we can also learn more about caring for ourselves and one another’s wellbeing in a year when everybody’s wellbeing is so important. We will highlight how individual wellbeing ripples out to enhance community wellbeing and further, societal wellbeing. “We’re all in this together”. We will plant a few more trees this year.
Dunboyne Clean Air
| Dunboyne Senior Primary School Meath 2021-173 Super Junior |
Dunboyne Senior Primary School is a Healthy Ireland Health Promoting school, an Active school and a Green School. We place a high priority on the promotion of health and well-being throughout our whole school community. Our school, along with hundreds of schools across Europe, has since 2019 participated in the GLOBE Air Quality Campaign. We are delighted to be participating in this citizen science project for the fourth time! Through this project, we have the following objectives: to promote awareness about local and wider air pollution and to explore the links between climate change and unsustainable forms of transport. We examined how our actions in our school and community will help to achieve some of these goals. As with our ongoing work on pollinators, we are partnering on this project with neighbouring schools and various community and sporting organisations. We are also partnering on this project with a broader network of national and international organisations to ensure the message has a wider impact: GLOBE and GLOBE IVSS, Eco-Unesco, Irish Aid, the Tephra Bag Experiment with Trinity College and University College Dublin, Climate Detectives European Space Agency programme, Climate Ambassadors programme, European Environmental Agency’s CleanAir@school project and ongoing work with our twinning school: Reggio Parco school in Turin, Italy.
We installed three nitrogen dioxide diffusion tubes in three suitable locations around our school including: near a main busy road, at a drop off parking point and in a sheltered area away from cars and traffic. These tubes were in place for between 2 and 4 weeks and they were then taken down, sealed and sent to a certified lab for analysis with the results of average nitrogen dioxide levels coming back to us via the GLOBE programme. We also began to measure traffic levels outside our school in November and December 2020.
We want to educate our school and wider community about the Global Goals for Sustainable Development and how our actions can help to achieve some of these goals. During this academic year our school has adopted a whole school approach to raising awareness about the importance of clean air for a healthy lifestyle. All classes in the school participated in creative projects such as poster design, creative multimedia, art and poetry writing relating to the theme of #DunboyneCleanAir. We continue to create opportunities to engage with the wider community and our new posters for this campaign will be installed at numerous locations around our community including at the playground, library, credit union, scouts den, soccer club, running club, local businesses, at a local GP surgery and more. We have had very positive feedback from the local and wider community to our previous poster campaign which also received a commendation at an international level through the GLOBE International Virtual Science Symposium in April 2020 and the GLOBE European Regional Meeting in October 2020.
We are participating in citizen science projects to complement our project: the Tephra (volcanic ash) experiment led by Trinity College as a potential solution to climate change by exploring if plants can speed up CO2 uptake from the atmosphere with the help of volcanic ash. We have also been invited to participate in a collaborative citizen science project looking at lichens and their sensitivity to air pollution. As part of a community-wide initiative led by Tidy Towns, we are introducing green infrastructure as an air pollution mitigation measure by planting cotoneaster in our school. We are excited that an opportunity has recently arisen to expand upon the theme of global citizenship within our project which has been selected to be featured in the very first issue of Global Goal Getters, an online children’s magazine from Irish Aid. Our school will be represented at a CleanAir@school EEA showcase event in Spring 2021 alongside our twinning school; Parco Reggio School in Turin and the EPA.
