We had a fun packed Science Week, where the whole school took part in a week-long programme of Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths events which were designed to spark curiosity and ignite wonder in STEM and our pupils really excelled themselves.
The week had a sparkling start with a murder mystery mayhem in assembly. Poor Bud Bloomingdale was found dead at the Produce Show and it was a race against time for the Year 6 Scene of Crime Officers (SOCOs) to conduct several laboratory tests in an effort to work out which of the suspects was guilty! After a week-long investigation, the forensic tests were completed and Year 6 concluded the guilty party was….Fleur Broccoli!
Pre-Prep had a packed week full of exciting investigations and experiments. Reception had a mini science lab set up and carried out lots of growth investigations including dying roses and planting herbs for Mother’s Day. Pre-Prep’s activities around the theme of growth included: making cress heads; tree trouble investigations during outdoor learning; rabbit problems in maths.
All subjects across the curriculum got involved from building Eiffel Towers out of spaghetti in French, to crops that grow near volcanoes in Global Studies and making planet friendly burgers in cookery
In Spanish for example Years 7 and 8 learnt about Margarita Salas, the most important female scientist in Spain. She was a courageous role model. She was the first woman to chair a big biomedical research centre, to be president of the Spanish Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Society, and the first to be elected to several academies. Additionally she was a tireless fighter for women’s equality in science.
Pupils completed some reading and listening activities about Margarita. For the reading task, pupils were challenged to decode the text independently, and when words were unknown, they had to figure out the meaning based on the context and the surrounding language. It is not necessary to understand every word when reading a text in a foreign language.
Reading activities are the perfect starting point to learn rich topic-related vocabulary (adjectives, nouns, verbs etc), pick up new grammar structures, steal ‘star phrases’ and ultimately improve comprehension and improve language acquisition skill.
You can see from these photos that all the pupils engaged brilliantly with the week and we can’t wait to see how all the things that were planted grow!
Categories: Events News Science
