Acmhainní do Mhúinteoirí

This website documents a project in which six County Sligo schools explored and documented the heritage sites of the county. It has lots of resources that can be used by other schools in Sligo.

Things to do
1.    Visit a local forest - you can find a list of forests and trails in your area here.
2.    Here you can download information and worksheets about trees. These worksheets are suitable for primary school children and are a fun way for children to learn about trees and the environment. Learn more about trees here.

This plant grows commonly in lawns and fields. Early in the year only its leaves are obvious. These are described as trefoil leaves - three leaflets from one stem. These trefoil leaves are easy to find and to recognise. Each leaflet is heart shaped with a pale V-shaped mark. The Irish word for clover is seamair. In spring when there are no flowers out yet, the leaves are young clover - seamair óg or shamrock.

There is a tradition that St Patrick used the leaf of the shamrock to illustrate his teachings about the Holy Trinity to the Irish people long ago. Just as there were three leaflets united in one leaf of the shamrock - so were the three deities of the holy trinity united as one God. To commemorate this, Irish people wear a bunch of shamrock in their lapels on March 17th - St Patrick’s Day.

The plant begins to flower in April and there are white clover flowers all summer long until the end of September. The white clover flower head is actually a cluster of small individual flower heads. The flowers can be visited by honey bees who gather the nectar to make particularly delicious clover honey. As the clover is a member of the pea family, its seeds are carried in pods.

Clover was planted by farmers in their pastures to improve the fertility of the soil. Plants need nitrogen in order to grow and usually, to get a good crop, the farmer must add nitrogen as a fertiliser to the soil. All members of the pea family - including the clovers - are able to take in the nitrogen from the air and use it to grow. They are able to fix nitrogen in this way because they have special nodules on their roots. These nodules are formed because the plant can form an association with a particular type of nitrogen-fixing bacteria and together the plant and bacteria work in a symbiotic relationship to fix nitrogen from the air. Thus, in the days before farmers had large quantities of cattle slurry to restore the nitrogen levels in their soil, they were very glad to plant clover and let it improve the nutrient quality of their soil.

Things to do with Senior Infants
1.    Around St Patrick’s Day, the class can be brought out to collect shamrock from the school lawn or field. They can be told about the tradition of St Patrick and the shamrock.
2.    In May or June the class can go out to look for clover in flower. White clover has obvious white flower heads. Pupils may also find red clover which has purple flowers which are larger than those of the white clover. They may also find small yellow clover flowers. These belong to a different species - yellow clover - which grows in the drier parts of grassland areas.

Woodlice feed on dead plant material such as dead leaves, rotten wood and dead plant roots. They play a very important role in the food chain as the nutrients locked in the plants are broken down and released by their activities. This is why they are so abundant in the leaf litter at the bottom of a hedge or in woodland. They in turn are part of the food chain, being eaten by spiders, pygmy shrews, hedgehogs and any bird sharp-eyed enough to see them. We have over 20 different species of woodlouse in Ireland — one called the pill bug is able to roll itself into a sphere when disturbed and this helps it to evade capture.

Things to do
1.    Do woodlice prefer light or darkness?
Get a shoebox. Have half the box covered with a lid. Put six of the woodlice into this box. Have a second similar shoebox with no lid as a control to show that you are doing a fair test, and put the other six in there. Come back later and observe where the woodlice are. They will all be in the shady side of the box.
2.    Do woodlice prefer damp or dry?
You can set up a similar experiment with the two boxes only this time no lids on either but a damp sponge in one section of one of the boxes and a dry sponge in a different section. Put two dry sponges in the second box. Put six woodlice in each and observe what happens. Are there more woodlice at the damp sponge than at the dry sponge?

This means that there is a queen and a colony of workers that live together in a nest. The queen hibernates for winter and in March wakes up. She emerges, chooses a nest site and begins to build a paperlike nest from chewed up timber. This nest can be in a hedge, in an attic or roof space, or in a disused shed. She lays eight eggs and when the eggs grow into worker wasps they take over the running of the nest. The queen goes into egg production full time and the workers build six-sided cells for the eggs. The workers are all female and they feed the baby wasps with chewed up greenflies, aphids and other insect garden pests. The adult wasps, on the other hand, feed on a sweet-tasting substance excreted by the grubs in the nest.

So all summer long from April to August, wasps do a great deal of good, keeping down the numbers of harmful plant pests. By the end of August, the queen will have laid up to 40,000 eggs and is beginning to tire. The nest can be the size of a football by now. The workers build different shaped cells in which eggs are laid that go on to be queens, while different shaped cells again cause her to lay eggs that produce drones.

These all leave the nest when mature, mate with those from other nests and the newly fertilized queens go into hibernation at once and emerge to start the cycle all over again next March. The old queen back at the original nest lays a last round of eggs and dies by the end of August. This last round of worker wasps have no younger babies to feed with insects, nor indeed any grubs to lick sweettasting liquid from. It is these last wasps during the months of September and October, for the six weeks lifespan that they have, that have to hunt everywhere for sweet food. They can eat nectar from flowers, or suck the juices of fallen apples and blackberries. But many of them do come into our homes seeking sugar there.

Of course they will sting if assaulted by an angry or terrified human. But they don’t seek us out deliberately to sting us. By the end of October, they will all have died. The nest is empty and won’t be used by next year’s queen. The whole cycle will begin again the following March.

About their sting — the sting of a wasp is like a needle and can be withdrawn after it is used in order to sting again. The bee has a sting with a serrated edge which gets stuck in our thick skin and cannot be withdrawn so a bee is torn apart as it tries to withdraw it from a human and will later die.

Things to do
1.    Get hold of a disused, empty wasps’ nest. Spray it with hair spray to render it less brittle. Bring into school and let the class examine the nest in detail. It can be cut in half in due course so that the intricate cell structure can be appreciated.

As a result, it can flower later than hedge flowers with no such support and the purple flowers of the vetch can be seen in hedges right up to the end of July. As it is a member of the pea family, the flower is typical of this family. It is described as being irregular — the petals are not symmetrical around a centre but are of different sizes and shapes and form a closed hood over the male and female parts. As a result, the flower is self-fertile and pollination occurs inside the closed flower. The seeds are carried in pods similar to those of a pea but much smaller and these turn black when ripe. The pods then split open suddenly and the seeds inside are shot out by the force. They settle further away and a new plant can then germinate.

All members of the legume family including vetches are, unusually among plants, able to fix nitrogen directly from the air. Plants need nitrogen for growth and cell formation, and normally plants absorb it from the soil in the form of nitrate. Vetches however have nodules on their roots which are formed in conjunction with special soil dwelling bacteria and these nodules are able to absorb nitrogen in a gaseous form directly from the air around the roots. When the plants rot back into the soil after death, the nitrogen is released as nitrate and thus leguminous plants enrich the soil in which they grow for other plants. This is why gorse can grow so well on poor soil or why farmers used to plant clover — another member of the legume family — in their pastures to improve conditions for grass growth.

Things to do
1.    Go out to hedges in May and June and look for this plant. Observe its tendrils holding on to other plants.
2.    Grow vegetable peas and sweet peas in the school garden or in pots in the classroom window and watch how they grow and climb.

Oak leaves are particularly prized by all sorts of insects who feed on them. The caterpillars of the purple hairstreak butterfly depend on them, as do many species of greenflies, shield bugs, moths etc. It fact it has been estimated that some 286 species of insects and other invertebrates feed on the leaves of the oak. All this eating of fresh oak leaves in May and June leaves the tree somewhat depleted. But the tree fights back, producing a new growth of leaves with lots of unpalatable tannin in them and quite browny-purple in colour at the end of July. These are called “Lammas Growth “, Lammas being the time of year between July and August.

Catkin-like flowers are produced by the tree in early April before the leaves are formed. This is because they are wind pollinated and the presence of leaves would get in the way of the blowing pollen. Acorns are formed from the fertilised flowers and ripen in autumn. These are prized as a source of food by birds such as jays and rooks, squirrels and by mice. Grey squirrels are able to eat unripe acorns, red squirrels must wait until they are fully ripe, by which time if there are grey squirrels in the area the acorns may be all gone, leaving the red squirrel short of food and unable to compete with the grey.

New oak trees will emerge from acorns which may have been buried and not retrieved by their owner later in the winter. There are two native oak species — the pedunculate oak whose acorns are borne on stalks and the sessile oak whose acorns have no stalks. Both are very long-living trees and can survive for well over five hundred years in ideal circumstances. The Irish name is dair and many places in Ireland reflect this. Counties Kildare and Derry are called after the oak as are all the place names beginning with Derry such as Derrynaflan and Derrynane.

Oak trees produce tannins so oak bark was much in demand by the leather tanning industry. Its timber was excellent for shipbuilding and for use as charcoal. So it was no wonder at the time of the plantations — particularly the Cromwellian plantation in the 1650s when soldiers were paid in land rather than money — that the first thing the planter did was strip the land of its timber in case their tenure there didn’t last very long.

Things to do
1.    Find an oak tree that the children can be brought to see. Collect leaves and acorns.
2.    Back in class get the pupils to draw outlines of the leaves so that they will learn their characteristic shape.
3.    The acorns can be sown in pots of compost and planted out the following summer when the seedlings have emerged.

Nests are large affairs made from reeds and sticks, and litter and rubbish can be added in too. Five to seven eggs are laid between March and May and incubation takes about 36 days. The young are called cygnets and they are able to swim the moment they hatch out. They are minded very well by both parents who will attack intruders by snorting and hissing at them, raising up their feathers in a threatening manner and indeed attacking if pressed. The young are taught to feed on submerged vegetation which they collect by upending themselves, stretching down with their long necks and pointing their tails up in the air. They will also come to eat bread if they are fed.

Young swans have browny-grey feathers and they don’t get the snowy white feathers until the springtime. At this stage they leave their parents and assemble in large bachelor herds at coastal estuaries or other good feeding grounds. Here they will stay until they are old enough to breed at two or three years of age.

Migratory swans have straight necks and yellow and black bills. These are Whooper swans which come here in winter from Iceland and Bewick’s swans who come from Russia and Siberia. These pass the winter in Ireland and return to their northerly breeding quarters when the snow and ice there has melted in mid-April.

Things to do with Senior Infants
1.    Tell them the story of the 'Children of Lir' or Hans Christian Anderson’s 'The Ugly Duckling'
2.    Take them to the park to feed swans with bread if there are any in the nearby locality.
3.    On their return get them to draw pictures of swans in their copies and colour in the beaks

The female lays three to six white eggs with red-brown speckles and they hatch after fifteen days. The nestlings are fed by both parents and are able to fly after 20 more days. They then fledge, leave the nest and don’t return to it again. Swallows are carnivores. They feed on aerial insects which they catch in their large gaping mouths. They cannot eat anything else so as the days shorten after the equinox in September, they gather in colonies on telegraph wires and suddenly all fly south to Africa to spend the winter. Irish swallows spend the winter in South Africa where it is warm enough to have sufficient aerial insects to feed them.

Long ago, people didn’t know that they migrated to Africa in winter. When they couldn’t see them flying around they were sure that they hibernated in the mud at the bottom of ponds. This of course doesn’t happen. When the days lengthen in March they set out once more for Ireland as the longer days in Ireland in summer means that they have up to eighteen hours of daylight to catch insects to feed their young — something that couldn’t happen in Africa as summer days there are much shorter. Their arrival in Ireland depends on weather and prevailing winds — in 2009 the first swallows were recorded here on 16 March.

But one swallow doesn’t make a summer and usually the main group do not arrive until April. There is a lot of folklore associated with swallows. Long ago there was a belief that ailments could be cured by treating them with something that resembled the ailment. Thus, because swallows twittered (rather than sang) they could be used as a treatment for stuttering and for epilepsy. This involved eating the flesh of the swallow, something we wouldn’t dream of doing now as swallows are a protected species. Swallows are seen as birds of good luck. It will bring good fortune if they nest on your property. Or it is a sign of good weather if they are flying high in the sky. They are also considered specially favoured by God so it is really unlucky to kill one.

Things to do
1.   Record the date when the first swallow is seen. Over the years this will give an indication of whether they are arriving earlier each year because of climate change. Go out in May to look for swallows flying in the sky. Ask the pupils to look inside sheds and barns to see if there are swallows nesting.

Squirrels build a nest out of sticks called a drey. This may be in the fork of a tree or more likely in a large hole in the tree and here they live during the winter. If it is too wet to forage they can draw on their stores of nuts but on fine bright winter days they will scamper down the tree and feed on the ground — grey squirrels in particular — and in fact they are easier to see in winter as there are no leaves on the trees. They can have one or two litters per year depending on the availability of food — one in spring and one in summer with up to three or four in each litter. They are weaned nine weeks after birth and the second litter in the year may spend the winter with the mother in the drey.

Grey squirrels are bigger than red and they tend to oust the red squirrels when they come into an area. Thirty years ago only red squirrels were found in the Dublin area but now except for one colony in St Anne’s Park in Raheny they have all been replaced by grey. The grey squirrel has spread south and east from Co. Longford but the red is holding on west of the Shannon. Greys do enormous damage to trees as they feed on bark and buds and this can cause small branches to wilt and snap. They also eat hazelnuts and acorns and can digest unripe acorns, something the reds cannot do. Reds like to feed on the seeds of pine cones as well as fungi which they collect from the forest floor. Red squirrels like to live in woodlands where there are evergreen trees with cones. Grey squirrels can live in the wooded areas of town parks as well as in deciduous and mixed forests.

Things to do
1.    It is quite easy to see grey squirrels if you live in an area where they are known to occur. Early in the day is the best time to go to the park or woodland and the pupils must be quiet and patient.

Male spiders have longer palyps than females. All spiders have eight eyes and two fangs - which are sharp hollow teeth through which they inject venom into their prey to kill them. All spiders have fangs and venom but in Ireland our spiders are too small to be able to penetrate our skin with their fangs. In South America, the biggest spiders — tarantulas — are found and their fangs can kill birds and mammals such as mice. They can give humans nasty bites too.

In Ireland, we have hunting spiders and web-spinning spiders. The hunting spiders come out at night and run after their prey. They can come into our houses if we leave windows open and can fall into the bath if it is the bathroom window they climb in. They are so big and the bath is so shiny that they cannot climb out again — which is why it is always a huge spider that is in the bath — the small ones can climb up and escape.

Web-spinning spiders make webs from silk produced by spinnerets at the end of their bodies. These sticky traps are positioned to catch unwary flying insects which blunder into them and become enmeshed in the sticky threads. The spider, who is waiting at the centre of the web, rushes in and kills the prey with a bite of its fangs. The spider doesn’t get trapped in the sticky web because it has oily feet that do not stick to the web. Having killed the trapped insect, the spider then sucks out all the soft insides as food, leaving hard bits such as wings and legs behind.

Any surplus flies are killed and wrapped up in silk and stored to be eaten later - or indeed to be presented to the female spider when the male goes looking for a mate. Spiders are not only carnivores, they are cannibals and the female will eat the male if given half a chance. So the male presents the female with a well-wrapped fly and mates with her while she is distracted unwrapping it and eating it. In other countries, the males are not so lucky - how do you think the Black Widow of North America got its name? Eggs are then laid in a web of silk and the young are left to their own devices. When they hatch and begin to move towards each other in an effort to eat each other the movement breaks the web nest and the spiderlings are scattered in the wind.

Things to do with Senior Infants
1.    Teach them Incy wincy spider and Little Miss Moffat. Read them Charlotte’s Web by E B White.
2.    Go outdoors on a damp, misty morning in late September to look for spiders’ webs all outlined with dewdrops. Railings or gorse bushes are good places to look.

It is a perennial plant, which means that it grows up each year in spring and summer, dies back in autumn and re-appears the following year without having to be re-sown. It is a low, straggling plant — reaching 50 cm at maximum length and often much lower than this. The stems are often reddish brown and have two distinct lines of hairs. The leaves are oval with a toothed edge. It is the flowers that attract the eye. These can appear as early as April and the plants flower all summer long until September. The pretty flowers are bright blue in colour and can be up to 12 mm across.

There are four petals — three the same size and one slightly smaller. There are two stamens displayed prominently and the pollen is formed in the white anthers at the ends. The petals are all joined together at the base and if one is pulled they all come off together in a crown with the stamens attached. Examined carefully, the female part can be seen sticking up from the centre of the flower.

Later in the year seeds will form in a flattened capsule on the stem. Pupils in school will be familiar with the rosette-leafed flowers of the school lawn such as daisies, dandelions and ribwort since their junior classes. They now must seek out a flower that grows there under slightly different management conditions and realise that the very technique of mowing determines what wild flowers will exist in an area of grassland. A good diversity of wild flowers is important so that there is a good biodiversity of insect life as well. Thus, by leaving perhaps just a small area unmown, the variety of flowers in the school’s grassy areas can be increased enormously.

This plant was familiar to Irish people in olden times and it was important in folk medicine. It was used by nursing mothers to soothe sore breasts. It was boiled with other herbs and the resultant liquor fed to cows with calves to protect them from ill luck and it was traditionally sewn into the garments of people going on a journey to protect them from accidents.

Things to do
1.   Observing, noticing, describing are all important skills that scientists must have. Having spoken about this plant in class, send out the pupils to find and bring in specimens. They must then write a scientific description of their plant with reference to flowers, petals, stamens, stem, hairs, leaves, where found and perhaps why. Writing this description requires that the pupils examine the plant for the scientific detail required. Use of a magnifying glass may be helpful.

This is a large snail, with a shell up to 40 mm across. The shell is yellowish brown in colour with up to five spiral bands. The snail inside has a dark brown body which it can extend so that its head stretches forward, with four horns visible. The two large horns carry the snail’s eyes and it is able to sense and smell with the two smaller lower horns. It secretes mucus though the flat underside of its body — known as the foot and it slides along on this mucus. It needs lots of water to keep its soft body from drying out and to manufacture enough mucus to slide along. Therefore, when the weather is hot and dry for a time the snail becomes dormant to save energy, goes right back into its shell and seals the entrance with quick-drying mucus.

It prefers warm, wet nights when it can emerge and slide around gardens and parks looking for food. Snails are herbivores and they really love to feast on small delicate garden plants such as newly planted seedlings, strawberries and courgettes. They have teeth all over their tongue — which is called a radula, and each one can do considerable damage at night in a newly-planted garden. When morning comes they hide away from danger and to protect themselves from drying out — often in communal roosts at the bottom of walls or under the overhang of window sills. Snails are all hermaphrodite, which means that they carry both male and female organs — there are no separate males or females.

However, one must meet another one to mate with, before they both go off to lay eggs. Each snail can lay up to a hundred white pearly eggs in the soil. No wonder there are so many of them during wet summers. They hibernate when winter comes, retreating into their shells and sealing off the entrance. They are a favourite food of hedgehogs. Thrushes are able to eat them by bashing open their shells against a stone (called a thrush’s anvil) and gobbling the contents.

Magpies are very good at finding them and crunching them whole. The garden snail is edible for humans as long as they are kept fasting for a while before cooking so that they excrete anything they may have eaten that would be poisonous to humans — such as ivy. Poisoning them with blue pellets is very bad for the environment as birds and hedgehogs that eat snails poisoned in this way will be adversely affected. Beer on the other hand kills snails but does not affect creatures higher up on the food chain.

Things to do
1.    Go out to the school grounds and look for snails. Search in the usual places. Mark each snail with a small dab of nail varnish. Repeat the exercise a week later and see how many of the new batch found is marked. By putting out sheets of old carpet or such like areas of cover, the chances of finding snails are increased.

Each flower is purple in colour and is described as being an irregular flower. This means that there is a top and a bottom to the flower as you look at it. The flower has two lips — the top lip is slightly hooded and the bottom lip is three-lobed with the centre lobe the largest of the three. By Second Class the pupils have already learnt about the daisy, dandelion, white clover and buttercup that grow in the grassy area of the school grounds so it is an exercise in observation sending them to find the purple self-heal flower when they are out of doors on a field trip.

The English name self-heal tells us that this plant played a very important role in the days when people had to get all their medicines from the plants they could gather. This plant was one of the best to heal wounds and so it got the name self-heal from the fact that it was easy for a person to gather it and heal themselves. It was also used for heart complaints — a tea was made from the plant and drunk to cure palpitations of the heart. It was given to children to rid them of worms and it was also thought to cure fevers and, surprisingly, to cure tuberculosis — something that it did not actually do.

Things to do
1.    A field trip to the grassy area near the school should be carried out in September and again in June to find all the wild flowers they know so far. The self-heal will be a new one to the list and should be easy to find on close inspection. One way to do this is to throw a hoop on the ground and examine all the plants within it. Which is the most abundant? How many different species of plants are there within the hoop?

Things to do
1.    Go to a local seaside or harbour and collect samples of seaweed, noting its texture, feel and smell. Also try to find a tide pool and take or draw a picture of the sea-life and seaweed living in and around the tide pool. Bring the seaweed back to the class room and study the seaweed as it dries out.
2.    Create a sea side mural, drawing the nature and wildlife that can be found by the sea.

A female however is tolerated and after a while they set up home together. The male collects nest material from which the female constructs a nest and fashions it to her body shape. Robins can have a clutch of up to six eggs which hatch out after two weeks and are fed by both parents with the creepy-crawly content of the garden — spiders, woodlice, small caterpillars and the like. In a good year, the performance can be repeated twice and even three times over, with the same missus of course.

Baby robins are all brown — they do not develop red feathers until they are fully grown. Once they leave the nest on their first flight, two weeks after they hatch out, they never return to it. They are fed by their parents in the garden for a few days until they learn to fend for themselves. So by the end of the summer, your robins could have had at least ten babies, which together with the original parents come to twelve — a six-fold increase in the robin population. But things don’t get to this stage. Most robins don’t survive babyhood. They are almost all caught by predators in the inexperienced early days of flying. They are food for the next level in the food chain. It has to be or they would all die of starvation.

By autumn the pairs have broken up and robins no longer hold territory. They will spend the winter in the garden surviving on whatever food they can find. Robins are omnivores, which means that they can digest food of both animal and plant origin. So they can survive the winter in Ireland and do not need to migrate to Africa like the swallow who can only feed on insects. But we can help them by putting out food.

Things to do
1.    Make a Christmas card with a robin on it.