St Patrick’s Aghagallon explore the depths of the Titanic

Mrs Gambold, the class teacher and ICT Coordinator, said: “Cross curricular projects are a great way to enthuse the children about their learning and to develop their knowledge skills and understanding in a 
practical way.”

She went on to explain that as part of this project the children were asked to research the Titanic story, and produce a model of the ship and a presentation about one of the paying passengers. Most of the children produced a Powerpoint and emailed it to their teacher. This was then used to enhance the children’s speaking and listening when they used the interactive white board to present their topic to the class.

The models proved to be a great success allowing the children to spend quality time at home working on this practical topic with parents and in one case a granddad. Stephen Devlin, P6 built a wooden model of Titanic with his Grandad. They used spare pieces of wood and old shelves. During his visit to the Titanic Centre in Belfast Stephen got very excited to see how the panels were attached to the ship using the clinker method because that was how he had built his ship.

Every child in the class followed the class moto of “Reduce Reuse and Recycle” to produce their fabulous models. However Meadhbh Lavery, P7 took a bold step and decided to bake a cake in the shape of Titanic and decorate it accordingly. Needless to say she was the most popular person in the whole school that day, and her ship went down a treat at break time with her class mates and the teachers.

During their very successful visit to the Titanic Centre in Belfast, at the end of October, the children were delighted to find the paying passengers they had researched and studied, on the ships original passenger lists. They also enjoyed the communications workshop when they learned about Naval Flags, Morse Code and Signals.

The children are now looking forward to having their models exhibited at the 
Titanic Centre over the coming months.