Galway Bay Hotel Green Schools Event

Our Green Schools Day Out On Wednesday 30th of January 2019, Fourth Class packed their bags and went out to the waiting bus. We were lucky enough to be invited to the Galway Bay Hotel for a Green Schools event. The Green Schools event was teaching us about plastic pollution and littering focusing on reducing plastic pollution in our oceans and seas. Firstly, when we arrived we were brought into a beautiful, spacious hall. Our table was called the ‘Lucky Lobsters’. There were two people dressed up as mascots, one as a lobster and one asa puffin. Some of us were a little scared of them! We listened to some speakers talking about projects they made in school. One man spoke about underwater animals and underwater photography. That was very interesting. We saw some photos of sea animals caught up in loose fishing nets and in plastic bags. It was sad to see. Another man was on stage dancing with a drum. He wanted us to join in and pretend to be starfish, seashells, lobsters and crabs. This was enjoyable and fun. We were then allowed to walk around and look at the other schools projects. We even saw a baby shark! Our favourite project was ‘The Beak Challenge’. This activity involved us choosing a‘claw’ from an assortment of different shaped items e.g. clothes peg, tweezers, and we had to fill up a paper cup with various things to resemble bird food. Another school had a large box of sand and like a ‘lucky dip’ we had to dip into the sand and pull out an item. Some of use pulled out seashells while others found plastic! This project showed us how our sandy beaches are being ruined by plastic rubbish. We also loved the ‘Sounds of the Sea’ quiz. Here, different sea creatures’ sounds we played and we had to guess what animals they were. This was much harder than it sounds! But we learned a lot from this quiz.  At lunchtime we moved to another gorgeous room and we were given adelicious dinner.  We even had ice-cream for dessert! Yum! When we were leaving, we were given a bamboo toothbrush and a lovely reusable water bottle. We are encouraged to reduce our use of plastic and these are two simple ways for us to start. We love them and we love our oceans so reducing plastic pollution is important to us! Overall, we thoroughly enjoyed the day and we learned so much about our marine life and how to reduce plastic pollution.