Scoil Mhuire Kilvemnon

Geography in a child-centred curriculum

An activity-based and broadly balanced geography curriculum that reflects the diversity of the subject can make an important contribution to the education of the child because it helps to answer some of his/her real needs.

Among its most important contributions to the education of the child, geography

• answers the child’s need to explore and understand the world around him/her

• equips the child with a range of skills and concepts enabling him/her to explore and record natural and human features and interactions in local and wider contexts in a systematic way
• helps the child to develop a sense of his/her own place and thus contributes to the child’s self-identity

• fosters the child’s sense of local, regional, national, European and global citizenship

We learn the geography of our local area, moving from here to the outside world.

Being involved in a Comenius Project has been invaluable in this process.

We are involved in this project to:
1. Open our eyes more widely to the bigger world that exists outside our little rural school gates!.
2. To learn more about the history, culture, folklore, traditions , music etc of the other participating countries in our group i.e. Austria and England through subject integration.
3. To increase awareness of the diversity of languages and dialects and the other LWULT languages spoken, by learning phrases, poems, songs etc from these countries. We also hope to promote the more common use of Irish within the participating countries.
4. With the help of a Comenius Language Assistant we hope also to introduce German as the third language of Scoil Mhuire.
5. To increase understanding and respect for those of other race and creed.
6. To highlight the integration of special needs students across Europe.
7. To promote equality in our co-educational school.
8. To encourage increased involvement of children from geographically and socio-economically disadvantaged area(s).
9. To open a window to the proximity of the global community through a.) increased use of I.T., b.) communication, c.) travel to participating schools.
10. To enhance the quality of the broad education and lifelong learning promoted in Scoil Mhuire, Kilvemnon.
11. To enable the children to disseminate their findings as the result of their three year journey of discovery.