Diary Entry - November

Our project has started with the first two seminars for the staff in our partner schools being held here at Kibworth. Both sessions were well attended, and it was really great to see how enthused everyone involved with the project has become.

In our first seminar, we talked about how we could improve our knowledge of science to enable us to support the children better.  There seemed to be many similarities in the concepts which staff found tricky, whether in terms of their own understanding, or when trying to extend the knowledge of the children. It was decided that we could all do with extra help on the subject of “electricity”, and Judith Green, Advanced Skills Teacher at our local Upper School kindly agreed to lead a session to help us with this concept. This will take place next month at our 3rd seminar.
We also introduced “Concept cartoons” and “Discovery Dog”, and demonstrated how they could be used by Teaching Assistants and teachers to get children talking about scientific concepts and discoveries. Each school has been given funding from the Science prize to purchase these resources, and we hope to share our experiences of using them at a future seminar.

Paul Stone introduced the Virtual Learning Environment to everyone, and showed how we could all use it to share ideas and resources from within our own schools. Our ICT technician has set up an area just for the use of the Science Prize, to enable us to share our knowledge and resources. Already each school has added lots of website links and other resources.

At our second seminar, we started the planning of a Science Conference for Primary children, to be held in January. Each school put forward ideas of experiments and demonstrations for the children to choose from, with each one being led by the Teaching Assistants from our schools, alongside keen Science enthusiasts from within our group of schools. These include parents, grandparents and year 10 and 11 pupils from Robert Smyth School.  The range of activities on offer to the children is very wide and varied, most adopting an “Earth” theme. We have also been in touch with local industry to ask them to help us to promote science at the conference whether by providing a speaker or resources we can use or give to the children.

Our next seminar is on 8th December, so more information will follow after that.

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