My Journey as a Primary Science Fellow: The next curriculum days

15 -16 April

The second curriculum courses were held in Wellington over these two days. It was also opportunity to catch up with the other science fellows to see how they were going.

The first day we spent the morning looking at the first science capability of ‘using evidence’ and unpacking what this means and how to teach it. We made balloon racers, and then tested them. We were able to observe each other’s cars and take some of their successful ideas and incorporate them into our adapted design. This was using evidence we see from their success.

We did three activities based on the sun. One was looking for places where UV wasn’t present by using UV beads.. The next activity was using a model of an earth and sun (lamp) to look at seasons. The last activity was using an OHP as the sun and a model of the moon. We were the earth and turned ourselves while holding the moon, in the light of the sun, to look at phases of the moon. The ‘using evidence’ for these activities was prior knowledge and testing ideas.

In the afternoon some of the fellows shared activities they had prepared around the context Planet Earth and Beyond, and using the capability of Using Evidence. The other fellows rotated around the activities and at the end they gave feedback and feed forward for each activity. My activity was a game called “Rock”. The participants put a rock on each square of the 4x4 grid, and then they read out clue cards and put a counter of their colour on a rock square that matched the description. When someone had 4 counters in a row they called out “ROCK!” to win. The ‘using evidence’ for this activity was using the cards as the evidence to identify the rocks.

There were other activities such as air pressure in balloons, reading temperature graphs to answer questions, making sink holes, making clouds in bottles, making geysers, and water pressure. I now have plenty of PEB activities to use for exploring the capability of ‘using evidence’.

The last activity took us to Te Papa where we had to find the evidence that showed the link between volcanoes and earthquakes.

The second day we spent some time looking at online resources and planning.