When water floods through your door and it hasn’t stopped raining for days, what you must not do is panic, according to pupils from eight Forfar primary schools who took part last term in an Eco Schools Enterprise Learning Day at Forfar Academy.
Nearly 200 P7 pupils from Whitehills, Langlands, Strathmore, Letham, Aberlemno, Inverarity, Tealing and Strathmartine participated in the series of activities at the academy to expand their knowledge of three themes - water, energy and health and wellbeing.
One of the activities was preparing emergency plans for drought in Africa and floods in the UK with the academy’s geography department.
“You have to be very visual with primary pupils, so I decorated my classroom with raindrops and sprayed the pupils with a water pistol,” says Helen Waggott, who led on floods. “My colleague Laura Ferguson decorated her room with suns and put the heating up. The standard of debate among the groups was high and they came up with many sensible suggestions for their emergency plans, such as keeping a cool head and making good use of sandbags.”
The focus was learning and teaching through enterprise, but the cluster organisers were also aware of its value for transition. “It was enterprise education, but it will also help forge, early on, P7S1 links,” explains Hazel Innes, cluster enterprise coordinator at the academy.
It was Mrs Innes who came up with the idea after talking to the primary headteachers. “Organising it was like a military operation as we had nine staff involved, which meant bringing in supply teachers and relocating their classes. We also had to think about transporting the 185 pupils from as far away as Dundee, but it worked well.”
The children also looked at healthy eating and recycling in the home economics department and exercise in PE and created a model island with a focus on renewable energy.
Su Clark
Photograph: Alamy.
