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STEAM Week
STEAM week was a triumph!
The children were enthused with their learning and inspired by science. The children were supported throughout the week by visiting scientist Ian Russell. Ian produces interactive science displays for museums and science centres all over the world. The children experienced a fantastic week of activities, not only drawing the subjects together but bringing the children together too, as they worked collaboratively to create and make exhibits for the Churcher’s College Junior School and Nursery Science Centre, which opened for one afternoon only to share their learning with each other and their parents.
The week started with the children experiencing Ian’s ‘Exploding Custard Show’ and their enthusiasm was infectious!
They were enthralled by his demonstrations – many of which can be tried at home! At break times, Ian entertained the children with gigantic bubble fun as he is also a bubble artist, and many were thrilled to be entrapped (briefly) within giant bubbles.
As part of Nursery’s STEAM week, the children looked in awe and wonder at some amazing bubbles in all sorts of colourful shapes and sizes. They even had the chance to stand INSIDE a bubble! They created art using bubbles and learnt how to create square and triangular bubbles.
Reception had a ball during STEAM week. They loved the exploding custard, smoke rings and gigantic bubbles galore! The colour show, involving primary coloured lights mixed together to make secondary colours, had the children spellbound! The children then mixed their own colours and made beautiful finger-printing leaves. As a Reception unit, Puffins and Dolphins have made a ‘Colour Mix Tree’, using food colouring in water and sucking it up in pipettes to squirt onto cotton pads to mix the colours for the leaves. The magnet activity was magical, and the children spent days exploring and investigating everything magnetic in the classrooms!
Year 1’s theme for STEAM week was ‘rainbows’. We launched the week with a story called ‘How to Catch a Rainbow’ where a girl goes on the hunt for different colours to make her very own rainbow. We decided she needed a little help and set off on a classroom rainbow hunt before writing rainbow poems. How do you catch a rainbow? Catch a…crater from Mars, a lion’s mane and a bright green lizard…just some of their imaginative ideas! In the classroom, they tried out some of their own rainbow-themed experiments. How do you make water walk? Or a fish disappear in water? The children had fun dissolving skittles, which created beautiful colours and patterns and was wonderful to observe as they slowly merged and changed. They really enjoyed making their own glasses using colour filters and watching the world around them take on a whole new view.
Year 2 investigated static electricity, exploring the phenomenon with activities like static electric butterflies and electric fleas. They had great fun finding out which surfaces provided the most amount of charge. When Ian visited the classroom, he was amazed to find out that a table was the most effective surface! He was very impressed with our young scientists.
Year 3 used their inquisitive nature to explore and question the world around them, focusing on the Cartesian Diver which looks at the effect of pressure on a pocket of air in water. All the children enjoyed designing and creating their own divers to experiment with. They worked hard in small groups to create some interesting presentations about how the knowledge gained from this experiment can also help them understand the movements of creatures with hydrostatic skeletons.
Year 4’s topic for the week was Robots and the children started off with a secret message about the spacebots that had landed in the school grounds over the weekend. The poor little spacebots had been abandoned by their mother ship and needed to be helped to return to their own planet. The first thing that needed doing was to make a launch pad for the ship to land on - Mrs Francis was able to help here and the children coded a bot so that it drew a route and a target for the spacecraft to land on. Then, of course, we had to design a camouflage outfit for each spacebot - lots of fun here as we added feathers, wings, hats, etc.
Finally, we all had to write up our thoughts and produce design boards ready for the Science Centre.
Alongside this, they had a magnificent session with Ian Russell where we made and launched rockets, adding fins to the basic shape to make it travel as fast as possible through the air.
Year 5 explored the solar system and wider universe and realised just how small us earthlings are! This was shown to even greater effect with a scaled solar system on the field with our visiting scientist, Ian, who showed us that on the field. In fact, we could reach only as far as Saturn, with the relative size of Earth being the size of a full stop! In small teams, they created their own solar system, from the Sun to Pluto, using Modroc. They then used Art lessons to create the texture and colours on the chosen planets in readiness for the Year 5 Science Centre display. These were both messy and fun in equal measure and gave them the opportunity to work in teams to achieve their goal. The children explored questions such as, ’How did the Earth begin?’ and ‘What is an Exoplanet?’ as part of our research projects. They used multiple sources to find the answers to our questions and presented their findings using a mixture of mediums. This was another opportunity to consider the audience and purpose of our final outcome as these would be on display in the CCJS Science Centre.
As if that wasn’t enough, they also created rockets that Ian sent into ‘orbit’ on Thursday afternoon.
Following the show, Year 6 had a Q&A session with Ian Russell, who was able to go into more detail about the workings of some of the exciting demonstrations and his life as an interactive science exhibit designer. The children then extended their knowledge of light by producing working camera obscuras and models that demonstrated thin film interference. They were able to describe the phenomena in detail following their research, and visitors to the Science Centre were amazed with their working, professional-looking models and explanatory posters.
Some of Year 6 also had the opportunity to be trained as demonstrators for the Science Centre and enjoyed the afternoon wowing the visitors with their newly acquired tricks of scientific phenomena.
Churcher's College, a charitable company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales with company number 10813349 and registered charity number 1173833
