Whether you are homeschooling, a teacher at primary school or above, Bedfordshire Great Ouse Valley Environmental Trust (BedsGOVET) have some exciting teaching resources for your use.
With the added value that you will be helping your pupils to understand the issues around their local environment, and in particular the River Great Ouse, which they will know so well.
By using these resources, you are also helping us to achieve one of our key aims, which is to inspire young people to learn about the safekeeping of the river and their environment in general. We are in a unique position where the work our charity undertakes provides a lot of knowledge and resources to enhance learning and experiences for all children and young people.
For the past three years, our science citizen project has been monitoring the River Great Ouse with the long-term aim of getting it clean enough to have designated swimming spots.
Alison Symonds, a former School Leader at St Joseph and St Gregory’s Primary school and volunteer at BEdsGOVET, has developed a range of activities and tasks for all to access which relate to relevant curriculum learning, children and young people’s interests and to the
trust’s work.
These resources are easy to use and fully customisable, allowing teachers to use them in a variety of ways to assist with their lesson plans. They are also aligned to key stages to make it easy for teachers to select the relevant resources.
These resources include:
- Key stage one Geography learning task
- Key stage two Geography learning task
- Key stage three Geography learning task
- Field trip hints sheet
- Discussion and advice for a River Great Ouse field trip that relates to BedsGOVET’s Citizen Science observations
- The River Great Ouse eBook – created by students at Bedford College, it highlights the history of the River Great Ouse
- The River Great Ouse eBook-editable version
- Educational talks aimed at pupils by volunteers
Use of live data
Our extensive testing programme provides a full range of real-time, scientific data that can be used as part of the sciences education, particularly for key stage 3 biology, chemistry and earth sciences too.
We use several scientific methods, including colour reactions that test for nitrates and phosphates, to monitor water quality at various sites at monthly intervals.
From these and other electronic monitoring sources, interesting real-world data sets are generated. Linking learning to a live situation provides the opportunity to assist an interesting citizen scientist project within an educational setting.
To assist media and communication lessons, our ‘Don’t Lose the Ouse’ campaign is regularly reported within the Bedford Independent online newspaper, as the text is accessible, it could be used by pupils as an example of reporting, or as source material for persuasive writing.
Our current resources are available on request by emailing alison.symonds@bedsgovet.org or info@bedsgovet.org.
If you have any resources that are available and appropriate, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us, and we would be happy to provide reciprocal links to your resources.
We would welcome your comments and ideas, and are looking forward to hearing from educators in Bedfordshire who would like to work with us on an ongoing basis.
Alternatively, if you would like to get involved as a volunteer, we are always keen to welcome new people to our community.
By Inga Wells. Executive MBA, PG Dip DMS
The Bedford Independent is proud to support BedsGOVET in their
vital work to monitor water quality in the River Great Ouse
and provide them with space for a column as
part of their Don’t Lose the Ouse campaign.
