As we come to the end of the academic year, our Transition Year learners at Coláiste na Scelige have been busy working on their nodes for the 1KM Health and Well-being trail. Read our previous blog about their work done before March.
Our four groups gave detailed Pecha Kucha presentations about their designs. A Pecha Kucha, a Japanese word for ‘chit-chat’, is a presentation style where learners must create 20 slides where they speak about each slide for 20 seconds (total 6-minute and 40-second presentations). They focused on four different areas of the trail:
The top of the school (site 6)
Near the gas tanks (site 3)
The football pitch (site 1)
The area near the basketball court and canteen (site 8)
Their designs ranged from building picnic tables, birdhouses, planting flowers, creating tyre planters, creating a football target practice area, and painting a mural.
We invited a panel to watch the presentations and give feedback to the learners. We were delighted to be joined by Breeda Whittington, the chair of the Parent’s Council, Joan O’Donoghue, the secretary of Cahersiveen Tidy Towns, Padraig Murphy, the TY coordinator, and Francis Courtney, the learners’ geography teacher. The learners were given an opening talk and words of encouragement from Principal Maurice Fitzgerald.
After careful consideration, we created a list of questions for the learners to consider based on their presentations and gave them written feedback from the panel. After discussing the feedback and questions, we decided on a number of elements for the learners to begin working on before the end of the school year:
Tyre planters
Painted target practice near the basketball court
Picnic tables
Mural
From this, the learners created a shopping list with details on where to get the materials and the amount and cost of the materials. We would like to say a big thank you to Breeda Whittington, the chair of the Parent’s Council who organised donations from local shops, and the local shops who donated materials for the build day: Quirke’s Homevalue Hardware and Corkerys Hardware. We would also like to thank Creative Places Uíbh Ráthaigh Micro Arts Fund who awarded a grant towards the costs of materials.
After their end-of-year trip, we had a build day where learners worked with external expertise to execute their plan. They worked hard on a day-long build day to power wash the target practice wall, paint tyres for planters, design the mural and assemble picnic tables. The learners also worked with artist Holly Woollett to design a mural design which is pending approval. Watch out for the final mural design and completion of the work to be posted!
Throughout this year, the learners have engaged in the circular design process where they empathised with users, defined the problem, ideated, prototyped and tested their ideas. Engaging in this process gave the learners the opportunity to work autonomously, to develop 21st Century skills such as creativity and critical thinking, and to develop Enterprise skills.
We are proud of the learners’ hard work!
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