Over 4,000 primary schools in Ireland, both North and South, have received activity booklets containing geological exercises and games as well as four large poster for display in the classroom as part of an educational outreach project co-ordinated by Dr Patrick Wyse Jackson, Senior Lecturer in Trinity College’s Department of Geology and Curator of TCD’s Geological Museum.  The objective of the project is to produce and distribute educational materials to encourage the study of geosciences at primary and secondary school level.  This project is the second phase of the outreach programme that saw rock samples distributed to almost 5,000 schools in the country in 2008.

A new website (www.geoschol.com)
has also been set up which carries digital versions of the geosciences
resources as well as links to geology institutions and educational
sites.  The posters that each of the schools will receive describe
different geological areas of interest such as the structure of the
Earth, the various uses of different rocks and minerals, illustrations
of some of Ireland’s building stones and a geological history of
Ireland.  These posters, which were designed by Dr Patrick Wyse Jackson
and Dr Adam Stuart Smith, a research associate who worked on the
project, can be freely downloaded from this site and offer children a
measuring chart that will allow them to travel through geological time
as they grow.

The first phase of the educational outreach programme, Six Common
Kinds of Rock from Ireland, was co-ordinated by TCD’s Dr Ian Sanders and
launched in February 2008.  Dr Sanders also authored a booklet to
accompany the rock sets explaining their origin and how they relate to
Ireland’s geological past.  Leaflets describing the geology of each
county in Ireland are available from the Geoschol website and to
complement the programme a book titled The Geology of Ireland: County by
County has been distributed to county libraries and museums across the
country.

These educational outreach projects are supported by Geoschol which
was funded by the Griffith Awards at the Geological Survey of Ireland
and involved a consortium of the Geological Museum in TCD, the National
Museum of Ireland and the Ulster Museum.

Full Story Trinity College