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Many of the primary schools on the Wirral, have limited resources for science. To address with this problem the pupils and teachers from Birkenhead School have produced Science in the Community. By Running a series of workshops for a range of year groups, “Science in the Community” has helped teach children topics such as forces, pH and classification, through a series of experiments. Below is a week by week diary what they have done.
Week 1
Force workshop with year 5 prep school. We split into four groups, each with a different topic based around the theme of forces, these included :- air rockets, weights, build a bridge, car ramps, and paper aeroplanes. The event was very successful and we had good feed back.
Presenters
- Paul Lewis
- Declan Gallagher
- Martin Ince
- Anish Pandey
- Tom Cutts
- Adam White
- Charlotte Irving
- Mathew Sherlock
Week 2
Theme of forces was carried over to our workshop at the Discovery Centre. Modified the previous week’s activities to cater for a larger audience of Year 7s. Explanations were ‘beefed up’; Aeroplanes were switched with helicopters and foot rockets were switched with cars on ramps to demonstrate the effects of friction. A successful first week at the Discovery Centre, although the time spent per activity required further tuning. Generally good feedback they especially enjoyed the rockets at the end.
Presenters
- M. Ince
- D. Parkes
- P. Lewis
- M. Sherlock
Week 3
A new exciting workshop on the theme this of Classification. We modified the time spent on each activity to 30 minutes each. We had two experiments Classification, Keys and Identification. The classification was split into classifying frogs and space creatures, while the other identification was naming animals and skulls. The feedback for this week was very encouraging and it went better than could be expected, though more helpers are needed in future.
Presenters
- M. Ince
- S. Jones
- S. Ziya
Week 4
Today we showed the denizens of the discovery centre just how the human body works. We started off with a quick game using a model of the body and got the children in pairs to assemble the body as fast as possible. This proved to be a more difficult task than was previously anticipated, as most of them had little previous knowledge of the body and its systems. Following the reassembly of the body they were given a brief discussion on the different parts of the body and why they are needed. Lastly as a treat we endeavoured to show them some optical illusions, and made them draw out ones that they liked.
Week 5
Origami, Japanese paper folding, was the second of the two activities. This started off with the making of a plant shape that could house a number of scientific questions and moving on to the more challenging rabbit. The activity was run by Declan and Paul with a high level of success, leaving the eager students with handy souvenirs to go home and amaze friends and family with.
The other activity was to do with plants. Here we did stomata peel and flower cut outs. Because of the quiz at the end we did not have enough time as we would have liked, but the activity went very well. There were some very successful peels and the children present seemed to enjoy it. Also the flower cut out was successful, especially with the girls, and many of them wanted to carry on after the time had passed. Generally this side of the road show was very successful with the children gaining a good understanding of plants and especially leaves.
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