Galiano Conservancy educators Ria & Emily showed off our new “Renewable Energy in Action” education program to eager teachers at the School District 64 Professional Development Day on Salt Spring Island.

For the first session, teachers put their thinking caps on and played a game to identify forms of energy in everyday objects. Using interactive games to teach young minds a basic understanding of energy forms and energy transformation is a great tool for teachers. Once students and teachers have a good base of energy literacy, we start to dive into renewable energy sources and discover how we can harvest and transforms their energy in to something useful to us.

In the second half of the day, we explored the most abundant and renewable energy source on earth…. SOLAR! To know where the energy form the sun comes from we first need to know the properties of light. Teachers witnessed the spectacular properties of light through rainbow diffraction glasses, prisms, colour wheels and radiometers. Lastly, teachers worked in teams to build Sunwind solar cars, and we took them out to see how they ran. Not only was this a lesson on solar photo voltaic cells but also mechanics. Many of the cars did not drive as strait as one would like; adjusting a few things here and there got their axels in line and gave the teachers more tools and problem solving for education in the classroom.

It was a fun filled day of learning and activities, and it gave teachers a taste of what the Galiano Conservancy’s new ‘Renewable Energy in Action’ program has in store This program is geared towards grade 6-8 aged kids and is bookable here.

Thank you to Dave Denning for the great shots.