Workshop & Teaching Planning Tool


Workshop Plan: RoundView Workshop for School Visits to Library PLAN (1)

Total Duration: 1 hours

 

Stage of Workshop

Adjustment

Time

Duration

1

Introduction - who are you, what is the process

Squashable

14:00

5

  • The RoundView is a fresh way of thinking about the world and how we fit into it. It shows us how we are causing environmental problems and what we need to do instead to fix things. 
  • Remember to say your name (Miss  ./ Mr .... and where you are from. Be ready for pupils to call you Miss or Sir. 
  • We will solve some puzzles, to give us clues and ideas for how we can help the planet and make a world where people and nature live well together

2

Timeline; 'Our Shared Story' - How did we get here? Orange puzzle

Squashable

14:05

15

Part One - roughly 5 minutes

The small bags from Our Shared Story should already be on the tables. Ask one person to be the volunteer monitor, and to empty the bag carefully on the table. 

  • There are twelve events from Our Shared Story - start by putting them in a row in order, what happened first, what happened next? 

  • Now, imagine that the 4.5 billion year story of the Earth happened over one calendar year. Put together the jigsaw calendar. 

  • Arrange the events along the calendar - which month do you think each event happened in?

You may need to give a few prompts, but can largely let students get on with it. the part that causes the most confusion is usually First Life - Photosynthesis starts - Sky goes blue. You can ask them to see what was it that made the sky go blue (oxygen). Where does the oxygen come from (hint is on one of the cards (it is photosynthesis, plants using sunlight to turn carbon dioxide and water to food and oxygen) - so this had to come first. 

Are plants alive? (yes) - therefore first life had to come first for there to be plants. 


Part Two- roughly 5 minutes (If you need to speed this up, put the frame out after just a few minutes.)

Now put out the 'answer frame', in the larger bags for Our Shared Story on the tables. Ask thee students to check their answers with this answer frame. If one group is going slower than the other, you may need to help them a bit to speed them up, showing where a few events go. 


If one table goes very goes very fast and is already done, ask them to look at the images and think what does this tell us about humans and how we fit into nature. What can we learn from this story about what we need to do in the future? 

  • It took a very, very long time for life to change the Earth so that complex life (anything big enough to be seen without a microscope) to survive. 

  • Life creates the conditions for more life, and for humans to emerge. 

  • We can see how quickly we have caused devastation - but just as the seeds of destruction are in our history, the seeds of hope and change are present in our creativity

  • for instance the invention of solar panels over 100 years ago that means we could capture all of the energy we need from the sun 


If you have time, you could ask if there was anything that surprised people from this puzzle? But to squash this, you can miss out the plenary feedback (this may also depend on the level of confidence of the students). 


Get the students to put all of the pieces back in the large bag (it is easier to sort them out into two bags afterwards) and remove from the table. 

RoundView logo

3

Cycle of life - Green Puzzle

Stretchable

14:20

10

Put the small bag for Cycle of life on the table and ask one volunteer to carefully empty it. 


Part One - 5 minutes MAX

  • If we want to figure out how to fix something, we need to figure out how it works. 
  • This puzzle shows how the Earth works (as a system). 
  • Look at at each piece of the puzzle. What are they? (for younger audiences / those with varying degrees of English language, you might ask each person to pick up a piece and name it to the group at the table). 
  • Put these pieces together to make a picture of how the Earth works. How do the pieces fit together?


Part Two - approx 5 minutes (If you need to speed this up, put the frame out after just a few minutes.)

After about 3 minutes,  give the answer frame and get students to put it together as a puzzle. to squash this, give out the frame sooner. Don't worry too much about people getting this right, they are just familiarising themselves with the pieces in this stage. 

You may need to help some tables, putting together the frame and showing where the sun goes, and that it feeds the tree. 

Hints - what is feeding what? Plants feed the animals, sun 'feeds' the plants, animals feed the decomposers (worms and mushrooms) and in turn, they feed the plants, 

Once students have put the puzzle together, ask them to look at it and work out what it tells us about how the Earth works (you can add the words' as a system' for older audiences). 

Encourage them to read the poem (if possible, get one student to read it out to the table). 


If possible, ask for some feedback from the tables on what they have learned from the jigsaw, and then summarise the key points about how the Earth works as a system:

  • Sunlight is the input (comes into the system) and heat is the output. (for older audiences, you can add - a few meteorites are added, a few rockets are fired of but basically only  hydrogen and helium is light enough to escape gravity on Earth, and in tiny amounts).

  • It is cycle, powered by sunlight
  • The engine that drives the cycle is nature (plants) and photosynthesis. 
  • Stuff (nutrients, water etc) flow around and around in balance 


Get the students to put all of the pieces back in the large bag (it is easier to sort them out into two bags afterwards) and remove from the table. 

4

Root causes of environmental problems & positive opposites - Red and Blue jigsaws

Squashable OR Stretchable

14:30

10

  • There are only 3 ways we can mess up this system - put together the red puzzle and see if you can work out what the three root causes are
  • Then put together the blue puzzle to see what the positive opposites are - this is what we need to do to be sustainable and fit within the natural cycle

If you do not have enough red and blue puzzles for each table to do this in order, you can have half the group do red, half blue and then scramble the jigsaw and swap tables to do the second puzzle. 

To speed this up, you can just get them to swap tables without scrambling the puzzle, they just go and look at the other puzzle. 

If you have time, often students like doing these puzzles several times, but do try to get them to look at the pieces and think about what they mean. 

You may need to help at some tables to speed them up - helping with the frame. A good hint is to think about to the tree, cow and mushroom - what order did they go in? 


Once a table has the jigsaws together, ask them to look at them and think about what it is showing. How are we causing problems for nature? What are the differences between the two puzzles? Encourage them to read the short poems - ideally one person reading them out to the table. 


If you have time - you can ask the group for feedback on what they learned from the puzzles. 


Facilitator to summarise - here are some notes, but don't worry about getting it all right - just try to give some key points and emphasise the idea that we can do things differently!:

  • The RoundView shows us the three ways we mess up the cycle of life. Every single environmental problem that you can think of is caused by these three root causes. 
  • Nature is the engine that drives the cycle, so one way we can cause problems is by Physically Damaging nature - we can cut down trees, pave over nature. If you think of a human body, this is like cutting off a finger or breaking a leg. 
  • This is a cycle - one of the ways we can cause problems is by putting too much stuff in the cycle. , this is the natural stuff, things that are part of nature, like carbon, but we put in too much, too fast. We overwhelm the cycle.  If we think of ourselves, it is healthy to drink water. But if you drink 5 litres of water in 5 minutes, what happens? (you die!)
  • Another way we can cause problems is by putting in stuff that doesn't belong, we can Poison nature.  This is like adding a few drops of poison to the glass of water that you are drinking. These are things like plastic and pesticides, stuff that just doesn't belong and doesn't break down into stuff that is safe for nature. If we throw a plastic bottle on the ground, it will still be there in hundreds of years. 
  • the bad news is that this is how we are doing things at the moment, but the good news is that if we know the three root causes of all environmental problems, all we have to do is the opposite of that and we will stop causing those problems in the first place. 
  • These are the RoundView Guidelines:
  • Instead of Damaging, we can put nature back - Restore ecosystems (if you have time - you can ask for examples of this - or just say, this is things like planting flowers for bees on the sides of the roads, planting trees in our schoolyards, and creating new nature reserves). 
  • Instead of overwhelming with too much, too fast, we can Balance our flows of natural stuff, and live off sunlight - think back to the timeline, we already have the inventions to capture sunlight and the wind to make electricity and we can use this instead of burning gas and oil to move cars and heat our houses.  You can ask here what else can we do to stop burning fossil fuels? For instance, we can walk or cycle to school, we can turn off the lights, and turn down the thermostat and put on a jumper.
  • Instead of Poisoning, we can Cycle any poison in the right loop - we need to make sure that anything that is dangerous for nature can be taken apart and reused again and again, and we never throw things like plastic away on the ground).  What else can we do? Use paper or cloth bags instead of plastic, stop using pesticides in our gardens and parks. 
  • And there is one more thing we need to think about whilst we are doing these three positive things - we need to think about people, what is the impact on people's health and happiness from our actions?
  • Withe these simple guidelines, we can redesign things so we stop causing problems in the first place - this gives us a guide towards a green future, a future that is positive for people AND nature. 


5

What future would you like to see? Draw a picture or write a poem

Skippable OR Squashable

14:40

15

Note this is the activity that is likely to get skipped if you have just 45 minutes, or time runs over. 

You can still give out the word search and suggest that they do the word search and draw a picture of the world they would like to see at home. 


Hand out the word searches, saying that the word search is for them to take away and do later to learn more. for now we will use the BACK of the word search. 


  • Draw a picture or write a poem about what kind of world you would like to see on the back of the wordsearch - try to use what you have learned today to inspire you. 
  • For younger groups, you can just leave out the blue jigsaw and ask them to draw the picture from that, or a part of the jigsaw. 
  • If a student wants to write a poem but is struggling, a good way to do it is to write a word with each letter on a line and then think of words or phrases for each letter - e.g. 
  • R - Running rivers
  • O - Oceans and clean water
  • U - Undo our damage
  • N - No more plastic!
  • D
  • V
  • I
  • E


If you run out of time, you may have to stay take these with you and finish them at home. 

6

Sharing ideas - plenary / some of kind of draw together and next steps - what can they do differently?

Squashable

14:55

5

  • Ask for feedback on a key idea per table from the whole group, What might you do differently after today? What can you do to help make the world a better place? You may need to give some examples - like - walk or cycle to school more often, plant some wildflowers or a tree at school, make a bug hotel at home. 

  • If you have time - a supplement here would be - what have you learned? How does it make you feel to learn the RoundView and see how we can stop causing problems? 


Make sure you hand out the bookmarks and a word search for each student (if you didn't already do that for the picture above). Check with the teacher if it is better to give a book mark to each student or to give the teacher the bookmarks to hand out later. 


(If they would like to download a certificate for the fridge that their parents can print out they can ask their parents to scan the code on the word search. - it is great if you can tell this to the teacher too.  


Workshop Information:

Beginnings:

Workshop Title
    • RoundView Workshop for School Visits to Library PLAN (1)

Participant number
    • 30 pupils is normal class size, they might be split in half with two activities

Nature of participants
    • school pupils

Aims of the workshop
    • Learn about the world and how people fit in
    • Introuce the RoundView framework of sustainability
    • Inspire ideas for change and action
    • Give students a sense of hope that we can do things differently and stop causing environmental problems

Outcome of the workshop
    • student engagement
    • demonstrate commitment to 'Every Library a Green Library'
    • testing innovative teaching and learning approaches

Inputs:

Themes

    Your Themes
    • 6 sets of each puzzle (for a class of 30, 6 tables of 5 students is ideal)
    • Our Shared Story (orange)
    • Cycle of Life jigsaws (green)
    •  Misguided Lines (red), 
    • RoundView Guidelines (blue)
    • Bell (to help get students to be quiet and keep to time)
    • Wordsearches (use the back for picture / poem)
    • Colour pens
    • Bookmarks
    • Sheet with further info and resources for the teacher

    • Table set up:

      Have all of the games ready to move quickly, take the small bags out from the large bags for the two-stage puzzles (Our Shared Story and Cycle of Life)

      You can put the small bag from Our Shared Story on the tables in prepration


Conclusions:

Data management
    • Encourage students to go on to make changes in their homes and schools
    • Give the teacher a sheet with more info for furhter exericises

Supplements, Skippables & Squashables:

Supplements
    • Any surprises from learning the RoundView?

Created using the ThinkingWare Workshop Planning Toolkit. thinkingware.manchester.ac.uk