Teaching ScienceHelp for trainee Science teachers

iBoard produce an excellent bank of interactive resources for Reception, Year 1 and Year 2 classes in several subjects, including literacy, numeracy and science.

In November last year iBoard was purchased by the TES and made available free of charge to all teachers, which is an excellent development.

If you are involved in teaching KS1, this is well worth a visit.

You can access the resources here: http://www.tes.iboard.co.uk/

Here are 10 websites that will prove useful to any teacher of Primary Science looking for things to use on their interactive whiteboard:

The Children’s University of Manchester. Several excellent interactive resources for Primary Science.

NGFL Cymru : Early years, KS1 and KS2 Science resources from the Welsh Grid for Learning.

Simple Science : I love these excellent science song videos. Great for lesson starters or reinforcement of key facts.

IWB.org.uk: KS1 and KS2 interactive science resources (and other subjects)

BBC Bitesize. Always worth a visit, some excellent resources here for Ks2.

BBC Learning Zone - lots of videos to use in Science and other lessons.

Birmingham Grid for Learning – some excellent resources here, and links to other sites.

Crickweb – great flash-based games for KS1 and Ks2 Science.

Fossweb - US site with some interesting interactive science activities.

Primary Resources – Home to some great resources – IWB files, powerpoints, links and more! Also worth checking out is Teaching Ideas, which is on very similar lines.

Don’t forget, if your school subscribes to Espresso, there are some excellent resources for EYFS, KS1 and KS2 in there. (OK, so that makes 11, but Espresso is well worth a look)

Image Credit : Kevin Dooley

Here’s a fun poster that shows Blooms Taxonomy for Primary Teachers taken from the Learning Today site.  Bloom’s Taxonomy is a multi-tiered model of classifying thinking according to six cognitive levels of complexity.

Visit the Learning Today website to download this as a PDF file.

For more about Blooms Taxonomy – check out these websites:

http://techlearning.com/article/8670

http://projects.coe.uga.edu/epltt/index.php?title=Bloom%27s_Taxonomy

http://edorigami.wikispaces.com/Bloom%27s+-+Introduction

A quick link for a Sunday afternoon. If you are looking for inspiration for your next classroom display then you really should take a look at the Display Photos website. There are great ideas for all subjects, including science.

Created by Mark Warner who also runs the brilliant Teaching Ideas website, it’s well worth taking some time to browse through the ideas and see if any inspire you to try something different next time!

Don’t forget, this is the perfect time to get your plastic bones and skeletons – the shops are full of halloween stuff!

Had a question at the weekend from a ex-scitt student for some help on how she could get the audio from a YouTube video and put it onto CD. I thought it might be useful to share the procedure I tried. It seemed to be pretty straightforward (ish)

Here is the original file on YouTube : http://www.youtube.com/watch/?v=EWrmTQPuCdI

The first thing I did was to alter the URL of the YouTube Page.

I removed the www. from the URL and entered kick in front of the youtube.com to give this address:

http://kickyoutube.com/watch/?v=EWrmTQPuCdI

This site allows you to download YouTube files in different formats. For this one I am going to just choose MP3.

Click on the MP3 button, and then click on the green Go button.

The Go button will change to a blue Down button.

Right click on the Down button and select Save Target As (or Save Link As)

You can then save this MP3 file to wherever you want to on your computer.

You should be able to then put this file into iTunes and burn to CD if you want.

As an additional step – I had a problem playing the MP3 file on my computer. So what I did was to convert the MP3 file using Switch Sound Converter – a free piece of software that I thoroughly recommend.

I just used it to convert the mp3 file into an mp3 file – which sounds silly, but the file it produced worked on my PC OK not sure why….

Hope this helps!

Here are a few links to useful resources for teaching Science in the Foundation Stage.

Early Years Foundation Stage Website

Knowledge and Understanding of the World

Outdoor Play – The Unique Value of the Outside Environment – South Glos Council

What Do We Know About Teaching Young Children? – Tricia David

Growing Schools – support for using the outdoor classroom

Teaching Science in the Foundation Stage – AstraZeneca

Fostering Curiosity in Early Years Science – AstraZeneca

Here’s a nice simple resource that could be used to teach Sound and Waves in Science. There are several sites that show oscilloscope traces when looking at sounds, and this is another one. It’s produced by Aartpack, and they call it a Digital Theramin – named after the staple musical instrument of 50s sci fi movies

What I like about this one is its simplicity. Plus it would work well on an interactive whiteboard to show how the shape of the sound “wave” changes as the pitch and volume changes.

Click the Menu button to show the optionss, and set it so that the Sine Waveform is set to a value, and the other 3 are turned off (no scale), like this:

Then if you click anywhere on the screen, a sine wave will be drawn and a note will be played (turn up your speakers!)

If you drag your finger/pen to the right the note will get higher and the waves will get closer together. Likewise drag your finger/pen to the left and the pitch will get lower.

If you drag up the screen the note will get louder, drag it down the screen and the note will get quieter. The amplitude of the sine wave will reduce.

This would be very nice to demonstrate sound waves at KS2 or Ks3.

The only drawback is that there is no way to set it up so it works without having to touch the board. I’d like to have seen a mode where you could place a button on the screen, and move that button up/down left/right to change the note. That way you could let go of the board to address the class and keep the note playing/displayed. I’m pleased to see it will resize to full-screen so you can make the resource fit the entire whiteboard.

There are more complicated settings that you can play with if you want to do some more advanced stuff, but the sine wave feature alone makes it a very handy bookmark to have for your Sound lesson! You can access the digital theramin/oscilloscope here.

There are other interactive resources on the Aartpack website too. It’s worth looking around the whole site to see what they have for other subjects too.

Science by Email looks like it could be a handy resource to keep an eye on:

“In recent years, Science by Email has produced a diverse range of science activities for subscribers to try at home or in the classroom. You can access them via this archive.”

You can also subscribe and have science ideas emailed direct to your inbox. The list is aimed at teachers in Australia, but anyone can join the mailing list.

Another service worth joining is Ictopus, which provides a weekly email of useful lesson ideas for Primary Teachers, for all subjects. It’s free to register, and you get access to the entire archive of past resources.

Great clip from last nights “Bang Goes the Theory” – a water powered jetpack

and remember, don’t try this at home.

This week, BBC One launches Bang Goes The Theory, a brand new series with a hands-on approach to science.

Presenters Jem Stansfield, Liz Bonnin, Dallas Campbell and Dr Yan Wong will pool their knowledge and curiosity to challenge the scientific principles that shape our world. It will include a series of experiments, one of which will see one of the show’s presenters, Dr Yan, being dramatically transported across a 2.5m void via magnetism: a method selected by the general public.

The series, co-produced with The Open University (OU), will be supported by free events and an interactive website. You too can do real science online and at home. It aims to bring all ages together with accessible science that encourages everyone to get their hands dirty. The Bang Goes The Theory blog, which is updated daily, will slowly establish the show — with a series of videos and exclusive pictures that follow the progress of the conception, testing, building and trialling of the contraption. A number of explanatory videos are already online.

Sounds like it could be a fun programme – a slight shame it’s going out right at the start of the school holidays so teachers can’t follow up on it immediately in the classroom.

Keep an eye on the show, and hopefully there will be clips you will be able to use after the Summer break which could be used to spark off exciting science investigations.