St Mary’s First School has celebrated Science Week 2019 with a bang - literally. Experiments have involved film canister rockets, elephant toothpaste, immersive messy play and plenty of other whiz, bang and pop experiments. Over the past two weeks, the pupils have focussed on science: they have been learning about scientists, being scientists themselves and conducting a series of experiments.

“Science is an intrinsic and fundamental part of the curriculum, it’s been lovely to see the children so engaged in the hands-on science we have been doing,” said Mrs Caruana, the Deputy Head Teacher. “The whole school came together for this celebration of science, Mrs Stych, our Science Coordinator, led the charge and as always, our enthusiastic staff members embraced the challenge head on and ran with it. The response has just been overwhelming: all the teachers planned a number of cross-curricular science based learning opportunities and the children have really loved it,” she added.

“We have been able to reach out to the wider school community by inviting ‘trusted adults’ in to school to conduct an experiment with the children; it’s been a very positive experience all round. The children love having their loved ones come in and share their school experience with them and, fair play to the adults, they all got stuck in and really embraced the competitive side of the experiments. For us as a school, our community links are extremely important.  When we are able to bring home and school life together for our children we are tethering their learning in a shared experience with a loved one. Here at St Mary’s we have always valued and worked hard at forging a close working partnership with our students’ families and it was lovely to have yet another opportunity to foster these essential links,’ said Mrs Sanguinetti, Head Teacher.

Nursery and Reception classes have been exploring the properties of materials through a series of ‘messy play’ activities. These included ‘rescuing’ arctic animals trapped in an ice block, making snow, creating mop brush paintings and many, many more.

“The children have learned a lot these past two weeks.  Their natural curiosity means that these type of hands-on scientific experiences are effective in engaging them at their level and really serves to capture their imagination,” commented Ms Monteverde, Early Years Coordinator. “We conduct activities like this throughout the year but it’s been great to be able to set aside a week specifically for this type of endeavour.’

As well as conducting a series of experiments and teaching science through Maths and English, Years 1, 2 and 3 each chose a scientist to study in closer detail and they created amazing display boards to showcase their learning around the subject. Other activities have included using iPads to record and create ‘How to’ tutorial videos about different experiments the children have undertaken over the two weeks. These activities incorporated a range of different skills, including; instructional writing,  mental recall, script writing, sequencing, ICT skills, public speaking, editing, evaluating and reflecting.

The culmination of these two weeks was an extremely well attended Science Fair where the Year 2 and Year 3 children were able to display the excellent science projects they had undertaken at home. With over 50 different entries, the judges, Ms Keri Scott and Mrs Jackie Linares, certainly had their work cut out for them. The entries were split into year groups and then 5 finalists were selected for each year group. From this, 4 were awarded ‘highly commended’ and one was given first place.

“These last two weeks have been excellent, a lot of fun, and a lot of hard work! There has just been a positive buzz around the school the whole time, it’s been great! We’ve had an amazing response to the science fair; so many interesting and varied entries using a wide range of media. For example, some children created models using expanding foam, others used iPads to record their experiments and findings, we had posters, ‘robotic arms’, posters and all sorts of other really interesting entries. The best thing about it for me personally, was seeing how enthusiastic the children were when talking about their independent study projects and the real depth of understanding they were able to demonstrate,’’ said Mrs Stych, Science Coordinator at St Mary’s First School.

The winners of this year’s science fair were Mateo and Isaac Cawdery in Year 2 and Reuben Young in Year 3.