The girls of Miss Roisin’s class have earned the Biosphere Award for their efforts to learn about and help protect our seals, an important and iconic species of Dublin Bay.

Experience: Their school is right beside the Strand Road in Sandymount. The children discussed their sightings of seals, and discussed potential dangers to these animals in their area. They also checked out these potential dangers outside of school, e.g. litter, dogs without leashes, etc.

Learn: as a whole class, the children came up with various 'headings' for their seal project. They brainstormed as a class, and each pod was allocated 2-3 headings. The children conducted research both independently and in class, and shared the information with one another. They used this shared information to make formal and informal deductions about grey seals in Ireland, and presented their information to the class.

These headings included:

• Habitat
• Diet
• Predators
• Appearance
• Babies
• Climate Change
• Dangers
• Endangered Status
• What We Can Do to Help

Take Action: the children wrote out their various facts neatly to be assembled into a large collaborative poster to be shown on their 'Biodiversity Noticeboard'. They put so much effort into this, and it ended up being massive! They also discussed how to spread the word, as they discovered that caring for grey seals really was their responsibility as citizens of Sandymount. Each pod had the chance to present their findings to a different class group in order to spread the word. For example, one pod presented to Junior/Senior Infants, another presented to 1st/2nd Class, and so on. The children wrote their scripts themselves and took questions at the end, which they answered fabulously!

These brilliant young naturalists will be presented with their biosphere badges next week which they’ll be proudly wearing on their bags and jackets.