A Beak Like a Banana: A children's environmental field guide for having fun in the outdoors.

A Beak like a Banana A children’s environmental field guide for having fun in the outdoors

This guide was made by...

Cillian Tierney, Ryan Magee, Saoirse Lenehan, Gemma Heraghty, Raymond Heraghty, Niamh Gilmartin, Conor Lenehan, Síofra White, Katelyn Rice, Grace Davis O’Kane, Oscar Feeney, Harry MacMullen, Rory Plunkett, Ralph Schiller, Ruaridh Macpherson, Dylan Nicholson, Ciarán Feeney, Malachy Oates, Kevin Magee, Pierce Lenehan, Eoin Callaghan, Oran Waters, Sophia Nicholson, Dani Henry.

We would like to thank Principal, Deirdre MacMullen and Teacher, Laura Mc Nulty at St. Patrick’s National School, Maugherow, Co. Sligo for working with us on this project. We would like to extend a special thank you to Seonag Macpherson for supporting the workshops during the site visit and back in the classroom. We would like to extend our appreciation and thanks to Sligo Tidy Towns, Sligo County Council and the Local Agenda 21 Environment Partnership Fund, without their support this project would not have happened. © Kids’ Own Publishing Partnership Ltd. 2016 ISBN 97819024333731 Published by KIDS’ OWN PUBLISHING PARTNERSHIP CLG. Carrigeens, Ballinful, Co. Sligo, Ireland. (+353) 719 124 945 http://kidsown.ie Charity number: 20639

Introduction This book is an easy to follow, simple to use guide to getting outside the classroom and into the environment.

Learning outside involves using our senses such as sight, sound, smell and touch to help us appreciate the natural environment. Learning outside is fun.

We hope this book helps you and your class to discover just that, how to have fun!

In our busy lives, the excitement of observing and enjoying nature can be missed. There is a sense of exploration in the field which can not be obtained from technology or TV. It is a sense that literally has to be experienced. To miss this experience is to lose a feeling of connectivity with nature, which can help develop a set of memories and experiential knowledge, much valued in later life.

We are bombarded with information about the fragility of our environment and messages of negativity around its current state. In all these messages the enjoyment of the world around us can be lost. We hope this book can help you and your fellow explorers develop that love and enjoyment.

The fundamentals of understanding and appreciating the environment around us starts with enjoyment.

If we are to value and sustainably manage our environment we must first understand why It is important to us. The basis of this understanding is to have a connectivity with the natural world, and to do this we must enjoy what it does for us and what we do in it.

Our young environmental explorers from St. Patrick’s National School in Maugherow went to the rocky sea shore on their environmental field trip because that is one of their local habitats. You can pick one close to you such as a woodland, a farm, a bog, a beach or a wild part of your school grounds. Getting to the location is only a part of the journey. It’s what you do when you’re there that marks the beginning of the real adventure. To help you plan your adventure we have put together some suggestions for you.

The explorers from Maugherow had great fun during their time in the field but equally the fun of planning your adventure and studying your finds back in the classroom is just as rewarding. We were able to use our local knowledge to decide where to go, our computer skills to map out our journey and our science knowledge to research the things we might see before our trip. In the field we completed drawings, took pictures and recorded details we saw, all helping to develop our observation skills. When we got back from our adventure we used our field notes to explore and learn more about what we found, we investigated the place we visited and tried to understand why this is important to us from a science, cultural and education perspective.

The natural world is our playground and we should continue to play in it. The sense of fun we had in developing this book made the experience and the learning so much easier. We hope you use this book and have the same experience.

Declan Feeney, lecturer in Environmental Science, IT Sligo.

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What is the Environment?

Our book is about: The beach, birds, shells, seaweed.

The natural environment.

All the stuff around us.

The natural stuff are the things that are already there and the man-made are the things that you make.

Trees need carbon dioxide. They breathe carbon dioxide and give us oxygen and we breathe oxygen and give them carbon dioxide.

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Everything – the air, the water, everything we use.

What is nature?

Nature is all the leaves and trees and bugs and grass.

Nature helps us breathe and it helps us survive and it helps everything that’s nature.

Without nature we would die and there would be no one else to live in the world.

Nature can help give us food.

Are all these things important to each other?

Yes! They help each other survive.

What did we do?

We made books and collected stuff from the beach.

We were looking at seaweed, birds, shells and rock pools.

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Seaweed This is seaweed. It’s kind of brown. You can pop the circle things. The one on the bottom is around two metres long. It’s kind of smooth and thin. It is brown and red and kind of yellow.

The poppy seaweed has little dots on it. The dots have air inside them for breathing.

Egg wrap seaweed has seaweed in the middle and it has a big bit that looks like an egg that floats to the top.

The kelp is very smooth and l o n g and feels funny.

The seaweed was really slippy. The smooth seaweed was like hair gel.

One of the types of seaweed is used in lipstick.

Some pieces can be 20 metres long.

The seaweed is for the fish to eat. And the seaweed can eat little animals like plankton.

The sun makes the seaweed grow.

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Seaweed that is stuck to the rocks are alive, so don’t touch them. If you pull them out of the rocks then they die.

It was like a tree hanging upside down.

Poppy seaweed, egg-wrap seaweed and kelp.

There was this one that was like liquorice because it looked like it had sugar on it. It was soft.

That looks like a rasher!

The kelp in the kelp forests can be higher than the school.

Another type of seaweed, gut seaweed, when you hold it, it’s quite smooth, and it feels really weird. It feels soft and it feels like you’re rubbing something that came out of you – like wet hair or something.

Mermaid’s purse. It hangs onto the seaweed so that the fish can grow and it holds their eggs.

We found seaweed that when it was in the water, it was kind of fluffy.

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Shells Shell is like an armour. They need the shell to keep them alive. The creatures in the shells are like slugs and snails.

I saw a stone and it was black, red, purple, pink, gold, silver and brown. It was like a carpet.

I think this one’s dangerous because it’s sharp.

We were looking at snails and they were coming out and there were creatures crawling.

The yellow shells are periwinkles.

When the snail is born, its shell is on him and when he grows, the shell grows.

He has his eyes at the bottom of the antennae.

If a bird is coming over to the snail it’s like it shuts its door – it just hides into the shell.

Me and Gemma are having a shell-off! It’s like a shark’s tooth. You can find shells under big rocks.

We saw a snail coming out of his shell. Snails have hundreds of teeth. Because they’re so small.

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People say you can hear the ocean in the shells.

The lines on this one go down and over.

I found this one from the rocks. It’s like a little baby shell from a baby snail. It’s brown and purple and the other one is shiny and purple and brown, but it’s much shinier.

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Birds Birds fly in the sky. Some can go 30 miles per hour.

I saw 29 birds!

They were black.

Seagulls were white with a bit of black.

They were about that size (a foot) but with the wings open they were bigger.

They were flying and they were in the water and they were on the rocks.

Crows They were black. And they had a bit of white.

A bird in the water – it was a tall thing and it was standing on one leg. We didn’t see the colour because it was kind of far away. It was eating fish.

Heron It was big, and it had big wings.

It had a pointy beak and big long legs.

It was grey and white. It was floating in the sea. It was catching a fish. The heron has a big neck, a black belly, black wings, a small head and yellowy beak.

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You can tell that the birds are different by their colour, size, shape and habitat.

We think that the Flamingo and the Heron might be connected because they look really alike. The flamingo had a beak like a banana and a boomerang.

And the heron had a beak that was pointy like chopsticks.

The flamingo has longer legs and is white and pink and the heron is black and grey. The flamingo has a longer neck as well. The flamingo eats a plant called algae and it sucks it up and the heron eats fish.

are there flamingos in ireland?

The flamingo lives in tropical countries like Africa and Brazil and countries like that. It’s too cold and wet here for the flamingo.

No birds have teeth – they just swallow it down, but the flamingo melts it in its mouth.

They were flying in a V-shape. They go to the back when they get tired. It gives them more energy.

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Rockpools It’s kind of deep.

Anemone It was a kind of reddish

thing. When you lift your finger from it, your finger feels like sand. It feels a bit slimy. The colour of it is red.

Me and Ruaridh saw lots of anemones.

They’re like ketchup.

The barnacles looked like gone off blueberries.

They’re kind of blue. They feel kind of crispy and their shells feel a bit hard.

Anemone. It’s a living thing. It looks like a blob of jelly. It eats plankton. They reach their tentacles out to get water.

When the tide comes in there’s more water and more creatures.

I saw a white thing and it had lines on it and it was stuck to the wall.

This rock’s colour is like a patchy whale.

The water can produce slime on the stones.

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We saw three snails cling on to each other’s shells. They were keeping safe.

They were called barnacles. They were attaching because they were being taken out of the water.

They were white – the barnacles. It looks like they have suction cups on the bottom.

We found this, a big colourful rock. It looks like someone mixed loads of sweets together.

In the rock pools we saw anemones and a lot of shells, some crabs and some stones and sand and seaweed.

They were white – the barnacles.

In the rock pools we saw different kinds of shells.

I saw a goldy shell.

Some slugs and stuff could be living in there.

We saw mussels, the mussels that you eat.

The mussels and the anemones need the sea and the sand and the seaweed.

We saw a hermit crab! It’s like a crab except it has six or seven legs. The shell could be any colour and the legs could be orange or red or white.

It’s kind of deep 13

The Food Web The birds eat the fish. We eat mussels and fish.

Snails eat the seaweed.

The plankton is eaten by the small fish and the small fish is eaten by the bigger fish and the bigger fish is eaten by the bigger fish…. The bigger fish is eaten by a seal and the great white shark eats the seal.

Something eats something and something eats that something and something eats that something.

It’s called the food web.

They’re important to us – because we can eat them.

The bigger the animal the more things they eat.

Animals don’t eat the wrong stuff and get food poisoning.

The smaller things eat plants as well and the bigger things eat meat and fish.

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Snails eat the seaweed

What did we smell and hear Seaweed smells really smelly.

Tsshhhh…. When the waves hit the rocks.

You smell kind of weird smells.

We heard birds and crabs clacking

their claws.

A shell. Ew, it stinks! It smells like seaweed.

I heard the sea, and I heard birds – they go squeak, squeak…

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Back in the classroom We were looking at snails and one of them was trying to crawl out of the dish.

They were changing colours – their shells. It was yellow and it changed to brown.

And one was brown and it changed to pinky with stripes.

And one looked like it was painted and it was called a painted shell. It looked like it had a little bit of pink and a little bit of gold and a little bit of silver.

It changed colour because it was camouflaging itself from predators.

Snails have doors to protect themselves from different types of birds – like ones that have big pointy beaks. They’re trying to get into the snail shell to eat the snail. The birds eat the snails so that they don’t starve to death. And maybe it keeps them healthy and maybe that’s what they like.

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Snails have doors to protect themselves from different types of birds

Snail shells They have to make their shells. They build them. Maybe from all the stones at the bottom of the ocean.

Maybe they use the sand.

On shells there’s a bellybutton.

How herons have adapted.

Why is he fishing in near the edge of the water? To find small fish.

How barnacles stick to the rocks‌.

They smash their heads and sticky stuff comes out and then they can stick to the rocks.

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Back in the Classroom What should we bring back to the classroom? We were careful not to harm the environment during our trip. We did collect shells, checking that no living creature was inside! We also took back drawings, our field notes and photographs.

In the classroom, we started by talking about our findings.We organised our drawings, images and field notes and we set up workstations. Each workstation had a different theme; Observation Station drawing specimens, Adaptation Station looking at our records and how our specimens live in their environment and Identification Station using Google and other computer apps to figure out what type of specimen we recorded. We had lots of questions, here are some;

Observation Station

Adaptation Station

Identification Station

What shape is it?

Where does it live?

What size is it?

What does it look like?

What does it hold on to?

What texture does it have?

What does it eat?

What do you notice about it?

What colour is it?

What eats it?

Does it smell?

How does it protect itself?

Does it move?

How does it move?

Fly, swim or run?

What noise does it make?

Here are some terms you might want to research in your class.

Habitat, ecosystem, biodiversity, ecosystem services, conservation, sustainability, ecology and environmental stewardship.

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Planning your Fieldtrip Fun Outside: When we got to our study site we all had jobs. We were on the rocky seashore looking at sea shells, seaweeds, rock pools and sea birds but you can chose from a location close to you. Here are some ideas; Woodland: tree bark texture, leaf shape and colour, tree silhouettes, woodland sounds & tracks (are they animal or human?)

On the farm: farm animals, hedgerow plants, field grasses, flower and farm sounds and smells Bogs: peatland plants, bird sounds, peat texture and what its made of Our school: hedges and hedgerows, grasses and flowers, school birds and animal tracks A park: tree shapes and outlines, leaf textures, park sounds and flowering plants Where else can you go ? We are sure there will be lots to do, wherever it is. Remember, the time of year does not matter, colour, light, sounds, smells and textures change with the season, there is always something to study!

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Plan your trip and scout the terrain beforehand Plant the seed with young explorers by planning together before you go Have the right clothes and footwear to enjoy yourself, whatever the weather Bring lots of materials to record all your findings; paper, pencils, camera, mp3 player Make it professional, each young explorer must have a job You can’t do everything, allocate time, don’t rush Collect lots of drawings, photographs, field notes and maybe even field sounds Leave all living species or plants, instead take photos, drawings, or notes Ask questions, even if no one knows the answer Bring the experience back to the classroom or home and put the trip in context Ask the young explorers to review their experience, ask them what they enjoyed and build their critical thinking Link the experience to other topics or subjects within the curriculum

Have fun!

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Our book is about: The beach, birds, shells, seaweed.

The natural environment.

All the stuff around us.

Nature is all the leaves and trees and bugs and grass.

This project was funded by the Local Agenda 21 Environment Partnership Fund 2015

ISBN 97819024333731 Š Kids’ Own Publishing Partnership 2016