The Year 7 and Year 8’s have recently been getting to grips with a large variety of topics in science. The academic exams that they will sit go far beyond the level of work that I was doing at their age in school and they are very lucky to have the facilities and resources to help them with the challenge. Wherever possible, ideas, concepts and knowledge are backed up by practical work which enables them to understand at a much greater depth, through kinaesthetic learning, the knowledge that they meet in textbooks, videos, interactive websites and the world around, etc.
They all very much enjoy the practical aspects, and by careful guidance in each lesson, learn many practical skills that are required later in their learning, as well as for life in general. Recently in class, they have been looking at their own cheek cells using the microscopes, as well as onion cells and a variety of more ‘bizarre’ items such as insect’s compound eyes.
By exploration, the pupils have found that ‘bigger isn’t always better’ and that looking at the microscopic can be just as fascinating as looking at an animal the size of a Blue Whale.
In chemistry, pupils were investigating the behaviours of different materials with heat and that learning that even metals have a considerable variation of conductivity. From this work they can better understand why saucepans may have ‘copper bottoms’!
Nutrition and diet are never far from the work in science and all pupils learn in a practical lesson how to test a food for starch and other types of nutrients. The idea of chemically recognising something by the reactions it shows may easily lead on further to a career in forensic science!
- Mr Worth, Head of Science