Science and Technology

Hello Bloggers!

In today’s blog I will be looking at science and technology activities and how they can be made engaging and relevant in primary education.

Science and technology is either a hit or miss with some students, they either love it or they hate it, I believe this is due to science either being very fun or very boring, its either exciting experiments or mind numbing textbook work.

Whilst it’s obviously preferred for all children to be engaged in science and technology lessons, you can’t have wild experiments every lesson due to the strain it would make on resources, although I believe these lessons need to be more consistent. I recently have been on placement and it took me back to when I was in primary school because science lessons were either an hour-long experiment where all the equipment was out and children were in lab coats or they would be sitting down with books describing materials and things like that.

Consistency is important because If a child comes into a lesson with high hopes for an exciting lesson and they then find out it’s book work, then their enthusiasm is immediately gone and they’re not going to be in the mindset for the rest of the lesson, I believe there needs to be a balance, all lessons should incorporate book work, and something for children to get their hands on, stimulate all the senses.

Donaldson (2015) states that science and technology go hand in hand and he later describes it as a way to capitalise on children’s curiosity and turn it into learning which I thought was very interesting, using a child’s natural behaviour to better their learning, I’ve spoken briefly about how children need to be stimulated and challenged constantly, why not allow them to create their own activities, I believe that science and technology lessons can be a brilliant way to incorporate student led learning, for example you could give the class or different groups a problem or something they need to measure and allow them to figure out how to conduct that experiment, the teacher could be more a facilitator and just oversee their learning; innervation and exploration are key in learning and give the pupil a sense of joy and accomplishment when it comes to running experiments.

There is only one foreseeable flaw I see with pupil lead learning in this context, with so much going on and with them being left to determine how to overcome a task, a child may become over stimulated and then lose focus on the task which can lead to behavioural issues and set the tone for the rest of the class, this is why I think whilst I believe children should be given a certain degree of freedom, it needs to be clear what the aim of the lesson is beforehand and any consequence for pupils that disrupt the lesson.

Relating back to the aim of this blog, the lessons also need to be relevant to children, children need to see that things they learn in the classroom have real life applications, when I was on placement there was one lessons that really impressed me where the teacher was teaching the children about friction and forces, and he had beforehand told them to bring in toy cars, he then weighed down their own toy cars from home to show how friction and drag work, he also brought in light plastic army men with parachutes and threw them into the air to demonstrate up thrust, and I think it’s that mix of the science and real life applications that make science more relevant to the children, that’s something they can take home and talk to their parents about and means that parents can converse with them too.

Overall, I believe that to make science and technology lessons more engaging and relevant, lessons need to have a consistent level of excitement, be partly student led, and students should be made clear of the fact that the things they learn have real life applications, thank you for reading.

References

  Donaldson, G (2015) Successful Futures: Independent Review of Curriculum and Assessment Arrangements in Wales