The already excellent Teaching Ideas website has added a whole new section comprising a bank of Science Inspiration Images for Primary Science lessons. Each image is downloadable as a high res PDF file.
Teachers can use these images to provide ideas and inspiration for Science in your classroom. They could be used as a lesson starter to review what the children already know, or as part of main activities when you introduce new concepts… or put them up on a classroom display!
It’s a great resource, definitely worth taking a look at if you’re teaching primary/elementary science.
I was inspired by John Davitt’s excellent Learning Event Generator and wanted to produce a similar version for Primary Science. Partly because I wanted to create some fun ideas for science and also because I wanted to try to brush up my Flash programming skills (or lack of them)
The end result is the beta version of the Primary Science Lesson Activity Generator. This is very much a beta, and I may be tweaking the events that can be produced in the future. But at present there are over 3,600 possible permutations – click the generate button to produce a new lesson idea.
Teachers Media is the new professional development service for everyone working in UK education, brought to you by the team behind Teachers TV.
This site contains a free library of over 3500 high-quality videos to help you and your team develop your professional skills, and support teaching and learning in your school and classroom.
The whole of the now defunct Teachers TV archive is available on the site. You can only view through the site – there’s no embed or download options. I don’t know if this will be added, or is due to rights issues… time will tell.
With the demise of the Teachers TV website and the opening up of the archive to other companies to distribute, expect more sites like this to appear in the near future such as the The TES website and SchoolsWorld.tv. There was also Leon Cych’s project for a crowdsourced attempt to archive and #SaveTTV.
rEvolution is a collection of online games, designed to introduce and reinforce key concepts in biology, ecology and plant science. They might make enjoyable activities for your science students at the end of term, as a plenary, or for a STEM Club. Suitable for KS3/4/5
Science on the Simpsons contains a collection of short clips from the Simpsons TV Show. The clips would make great lesson starter clips to introduce topics such as Natural Selection, Newtons Third Law and Angular Momentum. Thanks to Dan Burns for putting the collection together.
The clips are in mpeg format, and it’s recommended that they are downloaded to your computer before you use them. They could be inserted into a PowerPoint file or just played in your regular video player software – media player, vlc etc.
The clips are intended for use by science teachers in the classroom and so the posting and use of theses clips for educational purposes should conform with fair use in terms of copyright.
I’ve said this before, but I have a theory you can teach most of the Science curriculum using clips from Mythbusters And here’s another one that would be great in a GCSE physics class.
This is part of the episode “Mythssion Control” and this experiment is called “Crash Force” – if the video vanished from YouTube in the future try searchng for that.
Basically – the scenario is this. If you have two cars driving towards each other at 50mph and they smash into each other, the crash is the equivalent of one car driving into a stationary wall at 100mph. Or is it?
What do the students think?
Play the video until about the 1 minute 50 mark. Then get the students to make their predictions and explain their reasons.
Then play the rest of the video.
Surprised?
If you want – you can also show the first half of the experiment (up to about the 7 minute mark) where they test this in small scale – it might even be something you could try in the classroom first.
Solar System Scope is an amazing interactive 3D Model of our Solar System. You can zoom in and move the planets around the Sun to see how they move in relation to each other.
You can switch between an heliocentric view, geocentric view or a panoramic view of the Solar System. Earth centred view is great if you then use the play controls to move the time forwards as you can see the how day/night changes across the surface. Heliocentric view is good for showing how we get seasons as well as demonstrating the movement of the Moon around the Earth in the course of a month. The scales of the planets in relation to each other is not accurate – nor is the distance apart, but they’re necessary changes to make the whole thing fit on a screen and be useable!
Click on any planet to “visit” that planet and explore its surface – or get more information about it.
It’s a truly fabulous application -and every Science teacher should add it to their bookmarks for their next Space lesson alongside Google Moon, Mars and Sky. All of which are fantastic on an Interactive Whiteboard.
Here are some examples of space shuttle/rocket launches to use as scene setters for a lesson on Space.
This is a rather amazing HD video of the Shuttle Atlantis being launched, which is just beautiful:
I also found a few videos that include the countdown, including this one of Atlantis:
And also this one that puts you in the cockpit with the astronauts before and during launch:
I also found this video montage of high resolution photographs of Apollo 11 on the moon:
All of these videos could really help to put a space lesson in context – or be the spark for some creative writing based on what they have seen. What must it be like to be in that Shuttle as it takes off? How would it feel? Where could they go once they launched? etc
And here’s another one that would be great in a GCSE physics class.
