special educational needs...absolutely fabulous at foxfield
Foxfield School in Wirral is a secondary school pupils with severe learning difficulties, and they decided to take the notion of ‘Science Week’ quite literally!
Val Oldham, Secondary Science Advisory Teacher for Wirral contacted Science Year to tell us all about it:
"There is a school for SLD pupils in Wirral where the whole school is coming off timetable for Science Week. Each class is having 2 whole day trips out and 3 days in school doing a variety of science investigations, quizzes, games etc.
What an ‘Absolutely Fabulous’ project. The trips are to places like the Blue Planet Aquarium, Catalyst Science Discovery Centre, Liverpool Museum and Planetarium, an urban farm to find out about egg-hatching, and a bowling alley to investigate forces!!!"
Absolutely Fabulous indeed! All credit goes to Louise Wheeldon, who co-ordinated the week at Foxfield. And here are her notes for the week:
general aims for science week 11th – 15th march 2002
"National science week aims to celebrate science and its importance to our lives, giving people from across the UK the chance to participate in science activities and experiments" (from the BA-net).
in school the general aims are:
- To make science Fun!
- To increase pupils’ scientific enquiry skills.
- To allow pupils to undertake experiments / investigations that are not taught within current modules.
- To increase pupils’ interest in science.
more ideas for science week – school based activities.
• Taste tests - Undertake taste tests and investigate ‘the senses’. Can pupils taste the difference between Pepsi and Coke? Could devise an investigation to see how many members of the staff can tell the difference. This could lead to recording results, making bar charts and drawing conclusions. It will cover most Sc1 skills! (N.C – LTLP)
• Fruit clock – make a fruit clock using different types of fruit. Simple to set up as school has equipment to make this, just need to add fruit. You could also experiment with making a bulb light up in a circuit using different fruits as the batteries.
• Electronic microscope – investigate more or less anything using this microscope. Will work well with the digital projector and screen. Also has a time-lapse facility on it.
• Floating and sinking – investigate the best material / shape etc to make a boat which will float. Could test in swimming pool.
• Do sounds travel? – Adventure playground has sound tubes which can be explored. Could investigate whether sounds travel underwater, through different materials (make telephones) etc.
• Internet science activities – www.scienceyear.com has some links especially connected to Science Week (may be too advanced for some pupils to access). Refer to photocopy for addresses which may be of use.
• Launch a film canister rocket in 60 seconds – challenge the pupils to achieve a 60 second delay between priming and setting off! This activity needs to be done outside on a table or a bench. Need to do a safety / risk assessment!
• Have class competitions – for example how many balloons can you blow up, how many skips can you do etc in 60 seconds? These types of activities will develop estimating and prediction skills.
If you want to know more about Foxfield’s plans, click here to see a detailed plan of their week and the costings involved.
(NB: This is an Adobe Acrobat file of approx. 12k)