Green Sod Ireland

Visit from Janet Laffey - Green Sod Ireland

Janet Laffey is a landscape architect, environmental consultant and volunteer with the Green Sod Ireland Trust.
Green Sod Trust is an organisation that aims to protect and conserve land in Ireland for the sake of its indigenous inhabitants: animals, plants, soils, rocks, micro-organisms, watersheds and the like for their own sake, and for the sake of present and future generations.

On the 14^th November, Janet came to our school to do a workshop with the senior classes in conjunction with the All Ireland Pollinator Plan. It is called Bee Aware programme. In this workshop, the children learned how to identify different bumblebees. They came up with ideas on how to make the school grounds more pollinator friendly.

In this workshop the children learned about:  

• Different types of bee species.
• Process of pollination.
• Life-cycle of a bumblebee.
• Importance of bees.
• How to use a compass and read it’s four cardinal points. 
• High value and low value pollinator plants.

Janet was very informative and interactive with the children. They have a greater appreciation for biodiversity and they are aware that we have a responsibility to take measures to ensure sustainability in our environment.

Janet also included a workshop on bumblebees and showed us how to identify the different kind of native bumble bees by the sequence of their uniquely coloured stripes.