During the past few months, the GEAI volunteers Liv and Chiara were working on a mural project. Initiated was the project by our former director Mary and it was about designing a mural for the Transition Year of the Lough Allen College in Drumkeeran and building it reusing plastic bottle caps together with the class. It was meant as a final project after the four volunteers of GEAI held two educational sessions there about climate change and water quality at the end of January. The topic of the mural is about pollution of the oceans and its consequences; hence it is an addition to the content of the previous sessions.
First, Liv sketched multiple ideas for the design, with different measurements and depictions, so that they would be flexible with the final layout. They prepared the wood board on which the mural was supposed to go beforehand by painting the background for the bottle caps. Chiara and Liv painted the mural with acrylic paints from the school in the community hall. After a few days of drying, the project day of “bottle capping” had finally come on the 20th of March.
The painted wood board was transported back to the school and when the two arrived the class had already started to sort the bottle caps according to colour. They had already collected the caps before. A few started to work on sticking the bottle caps on the mural with glue while the rest of the class sorted the caps and kept up the stock of every needed colour. The students were very motivated to participate and had fun working on the mural. After a bit more than the time of a lesson, they finally finished with the bottle caps, so that the whole mural was now covered.
The mural was left to dry over the Easter holidays. Now plans are to hang it up outside the school for everyone to see and we also plan to attach an informational note to it mentioning the collaboration of the school with GEAI.
