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Science
Science is a dominant part of Rillington Primary School's curriculum offer, we ensure that pupils work scientifically as well as gain scientific knowledge and understanding throughout their time in our school.
Our high-quality science education provides our children with the foundations for understanding the world through the specific disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics.
Science has changed our lives and is vital to the world’s future prosperity, and all pupils should be taught essential aspects of the knowledge, methods, processes and uses of science.
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Intent:
One of the main aims is to improve pupils’ writing through science as well as guaranteeing pupils’ knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts.
The aim is to support pupils’ long term memory and to help them to ‘know more and remember more’.
To ask questions and be curious about the world around them in order to understand how science can be used to explain what is occurring, predict how things will behave, and analyse causes.
Implementation:
Our curriculum:
The starting point for our science curriculum is excellent quality literature to link the English learning with a specific science unit. For example, ‘The man who walked between the towers’ helps us focus on ‘Forces’ in science while pupils design the front page of the New York Times in English.
The knowledge, skills and understanding of both English and science are therefore of paramount importance as is the pedagogy that underpins the suggested activities.
The curriculum is designed in such a way it ensures that the integrity of both English and science remain, whilst providing natural links between the two.
The school’s curriculum is planned and sequenced so that new knowledge and skills build on what has been taught before, and towards defined end points.
At both key stages, the sticky knowledge takes full account of the national curriculum’s main characteristics of:
• Physics
• Chemistry
• Biology
• Working scientifically
Our science lessons:
We base our lessons on the EBIPA model of teaching science
Engage:
The engage part of the lesson motivate children by providing them with an opportunity to succeed as soon as they enter the classroom and recapping/consolidating key knowledge from the previous lesson.
Prior learning:
Children arrive into our lessons with an enormous amount of prior knowledge that we need to take account of. Some of this prior knowledge is right and some of this is wrong; and for many concepts in science, children have had time to develop some pretty deeply held misconceptions, therefore prior knowledge is incredibly important as it provided the framework for learning new knowledge. As well as this we ensure that we link new learning to something children already know, have heard about or have experienced, this means that an existing neuron in the brain is firing along with the one about the new learning. This creates a stronger pathway in the brain and makes it more likely that information will be retained. This means the knowledge is more likely to ‘stick’.
Introduce:
In this part we introduce new knowledge to the children, we begin with a concrete idea or simple context so that as teachers we start the learning from what our children already know. Modelling concepts to our children is important and we always ensure this occurs. What we deal with in science cannot be seen and so models are a powerful tool in the science classroom that help us represent, describe, explain and reason about the material world.
Build:
Children have the opportunity to practice what they have learnt in the introduce section to consolidate learning and develop understanding.
Apply:
Children have the opportunity to apply what they have learnt to new situations. This will assess understanding and consolidate understanding.
We also use knowledge organisers to support children's recall of knowledge:
Impact:
Children have a deep knowledge of scientific theories and how this can impact in the wider world
Children can demonstrate their scientific knowledge and skills through written and practical resources
Children are curious to find out how and why
