Glór na Mara National School, Tramore, was one of only 12 schools in Ireland, to qualify for the Our World Irish Aid Awards, which is organised by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.
The National Final took place on June 16th 2015, in Dublin Castle where the pupils were presented with their National Award Trophy by Minister Charlie Flanagan, Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade.
Under the guidance of Ms. Hearn, 5th Class qualified for this award by working very hard on a number of projects. They were very excited at being chosen out of hundreds of projects to represent Waterford and the South Region at the National Awards in Dublin Castle.
The whole school was excited too!
This is how it all happened:
Since January, 5th Class has been bringing the world to their classroom through their participation in the Our World Irish Aid Awards. They studied the Millennium Development Goals and the 9 partner countries, that Irish Aid is helping, and focused in particular, on Millennium Development Goal No.7, Ensure Environmental Sustainability. They looked at this from a global and a local perspective that is – how our actions affect people in developing countries.
As part of the project, they learned about Food Miles and began growing their own tomatoes in class, as well as helping in the school garden. 5th Class ran a ‘No Waste Day’ campaign for staff and pupils which saw a marked reduction in the amount of waste in lunches.
As if that wasn’t enough, they organised (with the other 5th class) a Walk to School Wednesday competition throughout the school, created clay movie animations with an artist from Waterford County Council to highlight the anti-litter message in a fun and interesting way.
Then, in April they held an Open Day to share this knowledge with the other children throughout the school. It was attended by members of the community, Tramore GIY, Tramore Tidy Towns, Agnes Aylward from Tramore Japanese Garden, Tramore Library representatives, Mayor Lola O’Sullivan and, of course, their parents and guardians. RTE also came and filmed the event which was shown on RTE News2Day.
What an amazing amount of work! Congratulations!