Teaching ScienceHelp for trainee Science teachers

Launched in 2005, Grow Your Own Potatoes (GYOP) was one of the first primary school based growing projects. Since then it has become the largest of its kind with almost 1 million children signed up for 2010 learning where potatoes come from, how they grow and that potatoes are a healthy food. Its simplicity and the fact that GYOP is a hands on activity makes it perfect for young pupils.

The twelve potato-based lessons are organised under the following headings:

• Growing potatoes
• Knowing potatoes
• Healthy eating and potatoes
• Cooking potatoes

The lesson notes are designed to provide the basic structure and content for lessons, but will need to be tweaked to meet the needs of individual classes.  Under the ‘task’ section there is a suggested task for children aged 5-7 and one for children aged 7-11 years.

Worksheets, PowerPoint presentations, factsheets, recipes, video clips and games are available to support the lessons.

Find out more here.

Here are a few ideas taken from some of the talks I have given this year for ideas on using your Interactive Whiteboard during lesson starters. They could also be used as plenary tasks. Some of the ideas you will have seen before in various places, but I’m bundling them up into one file.

Here are some of the activities that are in the file:

Organ Reveal : A student comes to the board and pulls out an organ. They then have one minute to talk about the organ and its role in the body without repetition or pauses…. I’ve also included the fishing rod and balloon activities from previous presentations.

Put it in the box : This activity makes use of the layer feature. One group will go into the box, the other group will not go into the box. Drag the insects into the box….

Keyword Bingo : Pupils use a selection of words to create a bingo grid on a piece of paper. Teacher can then reveal definitions at random. Cross it off the grid and see who can get three in a row and a full house.

Plenary Circle : Simple idea, but can be used at all key stages. Pull in pairs of words to make “I know that…. ” sentences. If you have a more able group, you could leave one word in for the next pupil to use in their sentence – this means you have to think more carefully about the range of words you put around the edge of the circle.

Word Builder : How many words can you make that relate to science. Give everyone time to make as many words as they can. Students can come to the board to show examples of the words they have made.

Use the links below to download a version of the file for your whiteboard:

Promethean ActivInspireVersion : Download here

Smart 10 Version : Download here

If you use the files, I’d love to hear how they went. If you do adapt them, please let me know what you did – I’d be interested in having a copy.

You are probably already aware of the problems with Sparklebox following the imprisonment of its creator

Here are three websites that are filling the gap left by Sparklebox – all of them provide free printable worksheets and display materials that teachers might find useful.

Twinkl : This is a brand new online resource centre created just for teachers. Resources for Literacy and Numeracy are already online, I’m hoping they’ll start to cover Science and other subjects to follow soon.

Primary School Teaching : Primary School Teaching is a platform for sharing and ranking teaching resources and ideas. Lots of subjects covered and a useful search facility.

Teachers Pet : Another new website with a growing bank of PDF resources to download. It was only launched this week – so give it time to grow. IWB resources are on their way apparently.

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.