Glór na Mara Primary School, Tramore, Co. Waterford is proud to be involved again this year with Our World Irish Aid Awards. Having successfully reached the Regional Final (Munster), the pupils and their teacher were selected to go forward to the National Final. They will be joined by Primary schools from the other regions.
One overall winner (see below) was announced in Dublin Castle on 11th June. Being announced as winners at Regional level was an amazing achievement! Over the past few years, other classes have achieved great success in this area, under the guidance of their teacher Kate-Marie Hearne – the inspiration behind it all!
Here is a short summary of their activities this year:
‘Over the last number of months, the pupils in Fourth Class have been bringing the world into our classroom, through our participation in the Our World Irish Aid Awards and our promotion of the UN Global Goals for Sustainable Development.
Irish Aid is a government organisation that works with 8 partner countries around the world.
Firstly, we learned about the challenges these lesser developed countries face. Then, we explored how the UN Global Goals are helping Irish Aid and people in these countries to find solutions to help themselves. Finally, we looked at how we could promote the UN Global Goals in our own lives and communities here in Ireland.
So in our school, we tried to teach all the pupils about these Global Goals. We delivered presentations to classes about the 17 goals using global globes that we made ourselves.
We organised a Global Games Day to teach the pupils about the goals in a fun and interesting way, using both exercise and board games.
We were extremely grateful to Supervalu, Tramore, for allowing us to conduct a survey of local people to find out how many customers had heard about the Global Goals.
Our ‘No Waste’ Campaign carried out a packaging investigation and ran an exciting poster competition in our school. The winning posters were displayed in Supervalu, Tramore, to encourage shoppers to think before buying packaged foods.
Our ‘Grow Your Own’ Campaign investigated how far our food has travelled. We are growing tomatoes in our classroom because we discovered that many of the tomatoes in our shops have to travel from as far away as Spain!
We are running a DOT (Do One Thing) challenge to encourage everyone to commit to doing one thing to help our environment.
We held an Open Day entitled ‘Leave No One Behind’ and invited members of our school and community, as well as parents, to come and learn about our projects and campaigns. We were thrilled to be joined by community groups – Tramore Tidy Towns, Tramore Eco Group and GIY as well as councillors and Mayor Joe Kelly. Senator Grace O’Sullivan was also in attendance. The day was a great success and it was a wonderful opportunity to share our message.
We were delighted to hear that we had been invited to attend the ‘Our World Irish Aid Awards’ Regional Finals in Cork, where we used the opportunity to encourage more people to ‘Do One Thing.’
We believe these small changes can make a big difference to our environment and that together we can protect our planet for future generations and ensure no one is left behind.’
National Final update ~11th June 2019
Glór na Mara are the 2019 National Winners! Fantastic news! Congratulations!
