Relight my (science) fire

I've never thought of myself as a particularly 'sciencey' person. I didn't hate it at school, but I never had any aspirations of pursuing a career in a white coat.

In our first science lecture today, the tutor was talking about how science is perceived by children and teachers. The report which we had to read as part of our pre-course tasks emphasized that it is never really seen as being as important as maths of english. Maybe it's because it isn't assessed externally? Maybe because of curriculum it open to interpretation? Maybe because teachers don't feel as confident teaching it (and is that because they don't have the time of resources available to prepare!?!)? Could be a number of different reasons.

In our lecture today, we discussed why we see scientists as being the stereotypical 'MAD' scientist when so many jobs use science on a daily basis without looking crazy - electrician, beautician, gardener, cancer researcher..... Maybe it's because of the people who are hired as science teachers!!!!

This led on to looking at the national curriculum and thinking about how we can make science accessible to children - by thinking about what their prior experiences are and what job might have something to do with it.

We even got to do a little practical investigation of making a paper 'helicopter' and timing it twirling down from a height. Then changing the size of the 'blades' and timing it again. The tutor then asked us to think of some questions:

The questions on the left were questions that in a lesson we could get the children to discover the answers to and the questions on the right were ones which we could get tell the children. This fed into the report when children said that they likes finding out the answers for themselves in science.

A key point that was made during this session was that :

there must be a purpose behind the practical

Lessons can be fun but there needs to a LO behind it as well.