Creativity in primary science

Exploring Primary Science and Technology

Series Editor: Brian Woolnough
Department of Educational Studies, University of Oxford

Science is one of the most exciting and challenging subjects within

the National Curriculum. This innovative new series is designed to
help primary school teachers to cope with the curriculum demands
by offering a range of stimulating and accessible texts grounded
in the very best of primary practice. Each book is written by an
experienced practitioner and seeks to inspire and encourage whilst
at the same time acknowledging the realities of classroom life.

Current and forthcoming titles

Jenny Frost: Creativity in primary science
Jane Johnston: Early explorations in science
Anne Qualter: Differentiated primary science
Creativity in primary science
JENNY FROST

OPEN UNIVERSITY PRESS

Buckingham • Philadelphia
Open University Press
Celtic Court
22 Ballmoor
Buckingham
MK18 IXW

and
1900 Frost Road, Suite 101
Bristol, PA 19007, USA

First Published 1997

Copyright © Jenny Frost 1997

Copyright © illustrations Sian Heaton 1997

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the
purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or
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licences (for reprographic reproduction) may be obtained from the
Copyright Licensing Agency Ltd of 90 Tottenham Court Road,
London, W1P 9HE.

A catalogue record of this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 0 335 19552 0 (pbk) 0 335 19553 9 (hbk)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Frost, Jenny.
Creativity in primary science / Jenny Frost.
p. cm. — (Exploring primary science and technology)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0—335—19552—0 (pbk) — ISBN 0—335—19553—9 (hbk)
1. Science—Study and teaching (Elementary)—Great Britain.
I. Title. II. Series.
LB1585.5.G7F76 1996
372.3'5—dc2O 96—17895
CIP

Typeset by Graphicraft Typesetters Limited, Hong Kong

Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Marston Book Services Limited, Oxford
 Contents

List of figures vi
Series editor's preface ix
Acknowledgements xii
Parti I
I Introduction — creativity in teaching 3
2 Science education — aims and research 11
Part 2 Case studies 33
3 Parks, woods and wastelands 35
4 Rabbit's House 65
5 Ourselves 81
6 The Channel tunnel 105
7 The river Thames 123
8 Seeing and light 146
Part 3 169
9 From action to reflection 171
Bibliography 183
Index 187
 List of figures

2.1 A problem situation presented in 'two steps' to

detect 'hidden' egocentric views 21
2.2 Torch and mirror activity and the related elicitation
questions (Osborne et a!. 1990, Appendices) 23
2.3 Clusters of skills in investigations (Russell and
Harlen 1990: 82—4) 28
3.1 Children's drawings of Professor Sense 40
3.2 Children's drawings of minibeasts 47
3.3 Data on minibeasts 47
3.4 Observation checklist 54
3.5 Investigation checklist 55
3.6 Concept maps (draft) 56
3.7 Charts summarizing the teaching and
assessment of the topic 60—4
4.1 Recording chart from group 4 66
4.2 Written account and drawing from L in Group 4 67
4.3 Written account and drawing from A in Group 4 67
4.4 Summaries of the first two class discussions 71
 List of figures vii

4.5 Summary of organization of teaching over two

weeks 72
4.6 Initial recording chart from group 1 74
4.7 Final recording chart from group 1 76
5.1 The Pine class scientist 82
5.2 Table of data on hair 85
5.3 Display of information researched about a pet 88
5.4 Changes in a child's knowledge about the body 91
5.5 'Data probe' to gauge children's ability to read
data 93
5.6 Personal ID cards 94
5.7 Does the person with the longest arms have the
biggest handspan? 95
5.8 What happens to your pulse when you exercise? 98
5.9 Growth: comparison of child with adult 100
5.10 Thoughts about growing up 102
5.11 Display for starting the next topic — more words 104
6.1 Planning chart for one term's integrated topic
on the Channel tunnel 106
6.2 Chronological sequence of the teaching 109
6.3 Tunnel building — things to think about 113
6.4 Problems to be faced in tunnel building 113
6.5 One child's plans for the tunnel from the school
to the pool 114
6.6 Questionnaires written by children 119
7.1 Plan from initial brainstorm 126
7.2 A more detailed plan of the topic 127
7.3 Time sequence of topic 129
7.4 Children's drawing and painting of a mackerel 130
7.5 Children's writing about structure of mackerel
and movement of fish in a classroom tank 131
7.6 Children's drawing and painting of a prawn 133
7.7 Children's writing about the structure of a
prawn 134
7.8 'River' in the classroom 138
7.9 Paddle boats comparisons — a fair test 140
7.10 Electrically driven boat from a Year 6 class 141
8.1 Four children's close observational drawings of
the eye 148
8.2 Chart to record distribution of colours of eyes 150
8.3 Low-relief model of the eye 152
viii List of figures

8.4 Results of 'Can we cut out a circle as well

with our eyes shut as with them open?' 156
8.5 Results of picture jigsaw used by B and L to
find out if people could do a jigsaw with their
eyes closed 159
8.6 Gauges used for measuring eye size (with results
marked) 163
8.7 Teaching sequence for work on relating the size
of the pupil of the eye to the available light 164
 Series editor's preface

One of the great achievements in the educational system of Eng-

land and Wales over the last decade has been the growth of sci-
ence and technology teaching in the primary school. Previously
this had been weak and spasmodic, often centring on the nature
table and craft work; now it is well established in the curriculum
of all children from the age of 5. Primary school teachers are to
be congratulated on this achievement, building their science work
on often uncertain foundations. This is therefore an appropriate
time for this series of books which looks in detail at what has
been achieved, and seeks to develop the fundamental principles
that underlie the ways in which children learn and teachers teach
science and technology in primary schools.
Two approaches to primary school science had been developing
prior to the introduction of a National Curriculum. The first saw
investigations as the focus of the children's work, studying aspects
of their natural environment to develop both an insight into the
underlying science and the way that scientists work. The second
approach was modelled more on the way in which science had
x Series editor's preface

been taught in the secondary school and centred on the content

of science which needed to be taught. When the National Curri-
culum for science was introduced in 1989 it sought, not entirely
satisfactorily, to bring together these two approaches, with half
the curriculum being given to explorations and investigations
and half to the content of science. In this series we are seeking
to explore primary science and technology further. We perceive
science and technology as more than an accretion of skills and
knowledge but rather as a holistic activity involving pupils' hands,
minds and hearts. For the pupils to fully learn and appreciate
science and technology they will need to develop their attitudes,
experiences and knowledge through activities which challenge
and stimulate them, and in which they find success and satisfac-
tion. We seek both to educate children in science and technology
and through science and technology, helping them both to appre-
ciate and enjoy these subjects and through them to develop their
personality and sense of self worth.
Doing science and technology is a very personal and individual-
istic matter. Learning science, like the learning of everything else
of real worth, is a messy, unpredictable but ultimately satisfying
process. One of the benefits of a National Curriculum is that it
establishes the place of science and technology in the curriculum.
One of the great weaknesses of the English National Curriculum
is that it has prescribed the content around an assessment struc-
ture which infers linear progression foreign to the way children
really learn. Children learn (differentially according to their apti-
tudes and strengths) by personal exploration; by testing out their
ideas in discussion and writing; by being encouraged when they
are on the right lines, and corrected when they seem to be head-
ing off in the wrong direction and are using the language of sci-
ence inappropriately. The teacher's vital and sensitive task is to
provide the appropriate stimulation in scientific and technological
contexts, to allow the children to express their thinking, and to
encourage and correct them as appropriate. In such a way children
will construct their own understanding and attitudes to science
and technology and become members of the broader scientific and
technological community.
Jenny Frost's book starts where many writers leave off, with
the teachers. This is not a book about the curriculum, and how
it should be taught. It is about teachers and the way that in
reality, they do teach it, using their personal and creative skills
 Series editor's preface xi

and their sensitive understanding of the children to modify their

teaching to meet the needs of the developing classroom situa-
tion. It focuses on, and celebrates, the ways that teachers use a
wealth of experience and tacit knowledge to enrich their teach-
ing beyond the formal demands of the curriculum. Through a
series of case studies of different teachers, she illustrates ways
that good classroom practice develops. She uses the analogy of
a play, directed by teachers with the pupils; not a tightly scripted
play, but one where improvisation occurs throughout, building
on the strengths and creativity of both the teacher and the pupils
to develop the story. Through personal involvement, the learning
and appreciation of the subject are deeply assimilated. This book
will stimulate and support teachers as they share in the creativity
of others and are encouraged to build on their own personal re-
sources in teaching and exploring primary science and technology
 Acknowledgements

I should like to thank Brian Woolnough for his invitation to write

this book and for his advice during the preparation; and also Shona
Mullen, the commissioning editor, for her support, guidance and
constructive criticism.
I am very grateful to Sian Heaton for undertaking the task
of making black and white illustrations from photographs;
essential features would have been lost had we tried to use the
photographs directly in the text. I also found her enthusiasm
for the ideas she found in the pictures of other teachers' class-
rooms an endorsement of my belief that sharing the ideas was
worthwhile.
Discussion with my colleagues at the Institute of Education and
with the many primary teachers I have met through our courses
has been invaluable over the years in fashioning my thoughts
about science education in general and about primary science in
particular. These have no doubt contributed to the book in many
imperceptible ways.
I would like to acknowledge the following for permission to
 Acknowledgements xiii

publish material: Open University Press, the Association for Sci-

ence Education, and Paul Chapman Publishers.
I have reserved until the end those to whom I owe the great-
est debt, the six teachers, Anne Robertson, Esmé Glauert, Siobhan
Quinlan, Claudette Bournes, Alex Lundie and Nicola Metcalf,
whose teaching forms the basis of the six case studies in Chap-
ters 3 to 8. They readily gave me permission to share their ideas
with others and have patiently answered my questions. I hope
that my writing does justice to their professional and intellectual
expertise and generosity
Part 1
 1

Introduction — creativity
in teaching

This book is about creativity in teaching, and a celebration of the

skills and expertise of primary teachers in the area of science.
It stems from my involvement in the professional development
of primary teachers. As science has emerged as an important part
of the primary curriculum (and since 1989, as a compulsory part),
so primary teachers have had to develop their professional skills
and knowledge to meet the demands. Science has become an
obligatory component of all initial teacher education courses. For
practising teachers, school-based INSET, off-site courses and dis-
tance learning packages have been brought to bear on the subject.
Publications in the field have proliferated; primary science has
attracted education research from the work of the lone M.Phil/
Ph.D. student to that of large funded projects. This book exam-
ines an area which has so far had little attention, namely the ways
in which primary teachers, from a whole range of different back-
grounds and expertise, go about the process of planning science
activities for young children.
One theme that can be found in many of the courses, publications
4 Creativity in primary science

and research projects is a 'deficit model' of primary teachers

— particularly in the area of scientific knowledge. Government
has funded GEST courses to enhance the scientific knowledge of
teachers (Kinder and Harland 1991); research has discovered, not
surprisingly, that primary teachers do not understand concepts
such as energy and forces in the way a physicist would (Summers
and Kruger 1992); OFSTED (1995) has reported on the lack of
confidence in science particularly at the top end of Key Stage 2;
teacher confidence (and particularly the lack of it) in subject-
matter has been researched (Wragg et a!. 1989) and made the
focus of a recent research project in Scotland (Harlen et a!. 1995).
While I would similarly stress the importance of subject knowl-
edge, in the course of my work I have met a considerable number
of primary teachers who claimed to have little formal knowledge
of science but who created imaginative and effective learning act-
ivities for their classes. To be fair, more recent research into teacher
confidence has also reported considerable increase in knowledge,
attributed mainly to three or four years of implementing science
in their classrooms (Carré and Carter 1993).
I began to talk increasingly with teachers about how they went
about planning. This required asking them to articulate and ana-
lyse an activity which had become almost second nature to them.
A variety of strategies were revealed, but also a range of stable
features. They talked of thinking about the class, the individuals
within it and the link between what was to be learnt and the chil-
dren's previous experience and imderstanding. They saw themselves
as the creator of events in which their classes and they could par-
ticipate. They thought about their own understanding of the topic
— could they put it into their own words, not just use the words

in the books? They identified the significance of a fact (if a spider

has eight legs — so what?). They seemed to be able to create games,
problems and quizzes that involved children in using new-found
ideas and hence in consolidating those ideas.
The analogy of writing a play began to emerge. The teachers
seemed to be engaged in writing a play for players that they
knew reasonably well, a play, however, in which everyone would
improvise. The end-point was known in outline, often not just to
the teacher, but to the class as well; the unfolding of the play,
however, was not known. The teacher became the provider of
the props, the organizer of the stage and the person who set the
scene and defined roughly what was to be done; the detailed script
 Introduction — creativity in teaching 5

developed as the play evolved. Teachers as co-players and pro-

ducers often had to replan as they went along. I began to explore
the ideas that they held in their minds which allowed the play to
continue and not go completely off the rails, and yet which al-
lowed them to change direction quite considerably from the course
they had anticipated before the lesson started.
The ideas were about the nature of science; the nature of science
in primary schools; the role that science plays in the education of
young children; understanding children; notions of learning; knowl-
edge of motivation; relationships between teachers and learners;
relationships between teachers and science; levels of complexity
of organization; awareness of resource constraints, including time;
the relationships between assessment and teaching; and finally,
the way in which a teacher reorganizes knowledge in the process
of preparing for, and undertaking, teaching.
Chapter 2 is devoted to exploring those ideas which relate par-
ticularly to science education in primary schools. It begins with
a consideration of what 'knowing some science' might entail in
general, in order to give some vision of what science education
in primary schools might be leading to. This is followed by a brief
review of some of the research into the learning and teaching of
science with young children.
The second part of the book, Chapters 3 to 8, is devoted to case
studies of sequences of lessons, sometimes over periods of one or
two weeks or up to a whole term. Each one is interesting in its own
right and many readers may gain specific ideas for classroom
teaching from the descriptions. Each example contains comment-
aries which relate back to the more theoretical and generalized
discussions which occur in Chapter 2. They were selected as ex-
amples of good practice in science education and as exemplifying,
and defining, the creativity in teaching which I had in mind.
The first case study on the teaching of a topic of parks, woods
and wastelands to a mixed Years 3 and 4 class (8 to 9-year-olds)
contains amongst other things the stories of Professor Sense and
Professor Question, created by the teacher, Anne Robertson, to
help children understand the importance of using their senses and
asking questions. It shows quite clearly the ongoing link between
assessment and planning throughout the topic and the careful
organization of time to allow development in children of very
different abilities. The teacher has a focus on learning science and
is quite clear about the skills and the knowledge that she wants
6 Creativity in primary science

the class to learn. The high priority she places on children's ability
to communicate is apparent. The complexity and diversity of ideas
and resources which are brought together are evidence of her abil-
ity to create an imaginative experience from many different parts.
The second case study, in Chapter 4, is one which people who
have been on courses at the Institute of Education are likely to
have heard, because I have used it on several occasions. 'Rabbit's
House' was an investigation undertaken by middle infants (Years
I and, 2, 5 to 7-year-olds) with Esmé Glauert; and it had taken
something like two weeks for the whole class to finish. This was
the first example where I asked a teacher to 'unpack' the planning
and the organization of a teaching/learning sequence, and found
that it was a far from straightforward task.
The management of time is something that features promin-
ently in the analysis of Rabbit's House. Time is a resource that has
to be divided up as part of the planning process and is one of the
aspects of teaching which beginning teachers find very difficult.
How do teachers plan for one afternoon, for a series of days, for
this week and next? How do they help children hold their learn-
ing over long timespans?
One of the most creative aspects of this example is the ability
to see the potential for a serious scientific investigation in a sim-
ple story and how to build in small but significant 'loose ends'
such that children have to sort out how to do something them-
selves. As in many of the case studies, the teacher focuses on
developing the children's ability to handle, record and interpret
data; the account includes her strategies for enabling these young
children to understand the significance of features of tables for
recording data.
Chapter 5 contains a case study on the topic of Ourselves taught
by Siobhan Quinlan, in a school in west London, just off Ladbroke
Grove. It was selected initially because the classroom was like an
Aladdin's cave, overflowing with interesting displays of the chil-
dren's work and resource material. The class was a Year 2 class
(6 to 7-year-olds) learning about skeletons and other parts of
the inside of the human body. One of the key elements here was
the sudden realization on the part of the children that they could
do simple science investigations on themselves. Like the teacher
in Rabbit's House, one of this teacher's objectives was that the
children should develop their skill at recording and interpreting
simple data. The personal ID cards, containing data which the
 Introduction — creativity in teaching 7

children built up from their own body measurements, were carried

with them to the next class to be used in a related topic a year
later.
The fourth and fifth case studies, in Chapters 6 and 7, came from
the Aquatech Project, which was run jointly by the Institute of
Education, the London Borough of Greenwich and the Society
for Underwater Technology. This project attempted to link indus-
try with teachers and to relate school studies with the water
industry. One topic is a study of the building of the Channel
tunnel (Year 6) and was taught by Claudette Bournes at a school
in Bexleyheath in south-east London. The other topic is related
to the river Thames (Year 4, 8 to 9-year-olds) and was taught by
Alex Lundie in a school in Abbey Wood, in the London Borough
of Greenwich.
The Channel tunnel topic has some similarities with Rabbit's
House because the explorations and investigations are relatively
simple and easy to resource; but it is thinking them up in the first
place which requires the inspiration. It also shows the ability of the
teacher to react to an unplanned resource — the arrival of snow —
to get the class to try and collect a cubic metre of snow so that they
could appreciate that the tunnel boring machines were remov-
ing 1100 cubic metres of spoil per day. They never did manage
to collect a cubic metre of the snow! She became aware of just
how much the children had learnt from the topic the following
term on the school trip to France. While there, they visited the
exhibition about the tunnel, which had all the labels in French.
The children were able to explain to their parents what all the
pictures and diagrams were about because they understood the
problems and solutions connected with building the tunnel.
The chapter on the Year 4 topic of the river Thames tracks the
teacher's planning and replanning in some detail, and describes
her classroom organization which allowed for children to work at
their own pace. The quality of observational drawings and writing
are impressive, as well as the willingness of one or two children
to write about things that went wrong with their investigations
as well as what went right. The sheer logistics involved — in the
organization of fish and prawns from the fishmonger for close
observational drawings, a paddling pool for trying out boats, a
driver' running in a plastic gutterpipe and a corner of the room
devoted to a model of a yacht used for drama and role play — are
significant features of this study.
8 Creativity in primary science

The teacher in the final case study was Nicola Metcalf, teach-
ing in a school in the London Borough of Harrow. The class is a
Year 1 class (5 to 6-year-olds). She follows in detail four pairs of
children as they grapple with designing investigations to find
out what things people can do with and without their eyes open.
She shows how it is necessary for a teacher to have sufficient
insight into the thinking of these relatively young children to be
able to identify what for them will be a significant investigation
and discovery. Her documentation of snippets of conversation
has been an invaluable resource. This particular case study was
prepared initially from the teacher's own report of her research
in her classroom. I have quoted extensively from it; so in this chap-
ter more than the others the direct voice of a teacher is heard.
I believe the case studies provide good examples of the way
in which teachers reorganize their knowledge of a subject in the
process of teaching. The activities they create, the questions they
ask, the analogies they use, the interesting stories that they tell,
are all part of this reorganization. They form what Shulman (1986)
called 'pedagogic content knowledge', learnt from experience, from
other teachers, often fashioned in the process of teaching in re-
sponse to a particular child. There is no simple way to learn them
but the preconditions are teachers' own interest in, and enthusiasm
and knowledge of the subject, coupled with a clear focus on the
children's learning of science and a willingness to try anything to
help them understand and be skilful.
The final part of the book, Chapter 9, returns to the ideas of
Chapter 2 to review the six case studies and to see how they, with
all the details of busy classrooms, give exemplars to illustrate the
general ideas about 'knowing some science' and the processes of
'coming to know some science'.
While I was preparing this book, I was asked how I envisaged it
being used and how it would be useful to both beginning teachers
and practising teachers. I will venture to offer a few suggestions
only.
An important function is the sharing of experience that books of
this sort make possible. Teaching, like so many professions, can be
isolating. After initial teacher education courses, many teachers do
not have the opportunity to watch other teachers teach, although
the process of appraisal is making some inroads into this iso-
lation. To share practice, however, is not to advocate that it
should be copied unquestioningly. The case studies do nevertheless
 Introduction — creativity in teaching 9

translate some of the generalities and principles described in

Chapters 1, 2 and 9 into specific instances, and may consequently
have the function of explaining the generalities. It is the general-
ities that may transfer from one context to another.
The acknowledgement that teaching, and particularly the plan-
ning for teaching, is creative may be helpful, especially to begin-
ning teachers. Each year I find that the most difficult sessions for
beginning teachers are those devoted to planning. I sometimes won-
der if inadvertently we have given the impression that planning
is straightforward, and that there is a magic planning formula
that can be applied. At the same time, the book makes clear the
constraints pertaining to teaching, which mean that teachers do
not have infinite choice over what they do.
The book may also be useful for those teachers who are tak-
ing an increased role in initial teacher education. As professional
courses require participants to spend a larger part of their time
in schools, experienced teachers will require the skill to be able to
explain and discuss the craft of the classroom as well as demon-
strate it.
I have had considerable encouragement from people in sci-
ence teaching to write the book, to celebrate the creative aspect
of teaching science. The introduction of the National Curriculum
in England and Wales has increased the teaching of science in
primary schools (and incidentally increased teachers' confidence
to teach science (Wragg 1994)), but the attention paid to mak-
ing sure all aspects are covered has taken up a lot of nervous
energy and time. I realized as I was writing that the examples in
the book could be analysed against the National Curriculum
and they would not be found wanting. The National Curriculum
in science, as such, does not prohibit creative teaching.

A comment for those readers who do not know

English primary schools

I cannot be sure of the extent to which these case studies and the
messages within them will translate to contexts in other countries.
I believe that the more general principles concerned with learn-
ing and the ideas for simple explorations and investigations will
be applicable in other places. The size of classes in the schools in
this book rarely exceeds 30 children, so some of the organization
10 Creativity in primary science

may not transfer to schools where teachers are coping with much
larger numbers.
An explanation also needs to be given about the apparent auto-
nomy of teachers to select what topic they want. The National
Curriculum provides outline programmes of study but allows
considerable scope for the order in which topics are taught. Many
schools have developed carefully planned sequences of topics to
be taught throughout the school, so that the children progress-
ively cover the requirements of the National Curriculum (DFE
1995). I have referred in several chapters to the teachers having
to teach a certain topic because it was on the school's 'planning
grid'. These whole-school plans generally specify the concepts in
science to be taught, but not the contexts in which they are taught;
consequently there is flexibility over what the teacher chooses.
Teachers and schools also vary in the extent to which a topic
carries the whole of the curriculum. In Chapters 3, 5 and 6, the
teachers were teaching an 'integrated topic' which covered the
whole of the curriculum. In the other case studies the work had
a more restricted focus.
As a whole, the book should provide windows on to teaching and
learning in science whatever the organization within the school.
 2
Science education — aims
and research

The case studies which take up two-thirds of this book focus on

classroom practice and appear at first sight to be merely descript-
ive; they give information about the classroom, about what was
taught and what was learnt, and about how it was taught and
learnt. There have, however, been several influences on what has
been selected and what has been emphasized, and these are ex-
plained in this chapter. One influence is my own notion of the
goals of science education in general, not just in primary schools.
Another influence comes from research in science education where
both research questions and research findings have helped the
understanding of science classrooms. Obviously the wish to use
the case study material to develop the theme of creativity in teach-
ing has influenced the way the stories have been told.

Goals of science education — 'knowing some science'

There has been, over the last two decades, a tendency to regard
mary science' as an object separate from other learning in science,
12 Creativity in primary science

as though it has some special and different identity. I think it may

at times be helpful to remove this special connotation and just
think about what we mean when we say that somebody 'knows
some science', and recognize that the studies undertaken in the
area of science when children are in primary school form part
of a learning continuum. I have therefore started by 'unpicking'
this notion of 'knowing some science' by describing ten different
facets of it: knowing about the natural and made world; under-
standing explanations; being familiar with scientific concepts;
asking questions; understanding experiments; interpreting data;
having technical know-how; linking science and everyday occur-
rences; appreciating the nature of science; appreciating the cultural
significance of science.

Knowing about the natural and made worlds

To know some science is to know what can be done to objects
and materials and what will happen when these things are done:
for instance, that when a ball is released it falls to the ground;
that when air is warmed it expands: that when a magnet is put
near iron, it will attract it: that when a chicken's egg is cooked it
changes, never to return to the raw state again; that when a cater-
pillar is fed it will grow into a moth, butterfly, or insect of some
sort; that something as solid as a rock might crumble away in
time. . People who know some science will not know all the
.

things there are to know, but will know quite a few and will be
aware that there are many more that could be looked up in books,
or learnt from experience or from other people.

Understanding explanation
They will also know that there are explanations of how these
things happen: gravitational attraction between the ball and the
earth; increased movement of molecules in heated air; alignment
of the crystals in iron; irreversible chemical changes in the egg;
ability of the body of a living thing to convert the food it eats into
things it needs, either to fuel its body processes or to continue to
build its own body; that rain and wind can slowly erode hard
materials and that what was once rock may become part of the
soil. They will know some of these explanations and know how
they fit the phenomena. There will be many explanations that they
 Science education — aims and research 13

do not know but they will be aware that these also could possibly
be looked up in books.

Being familiar with scientific concepts

They may know about things like black holes, genes, electrons,
atoms, molecules, galaxies, DNA, continental plates, continental
drift, germs, hormones. and have some mental image of what
. .

they are like. They will be able to imagine sound as vibrations,

light as an entity distinct from its source, electricity as a flow of
electrons.

Asking questions
People are more inquisitive about the things they know about
than about the things they do not. So people who know some
science are also likely to ask questions about how things happen;
what causes them to happen; what the processes involved are;
how people have come to give such explanations; what evidence
supports the explanations.

Understanding experiments
Experiments are taken as one of the hallmarks of science. They
involve certain procedures, but in each case, experimenters have
to decide how to proceed in order to extract the evidence that is
needed to answer a question. People who know some science have
some idea about how to design an experiment, how to collect data
and possible ways of making sense of that data.

Interpreting data
People who know some science are likely not to be daunted by
looking at sets of numerical data relating to the natural and mater-
ial world; information on food packets; weather data; temperature
and blood pressure charts at the end of a patient's bed in hospital.
This does not mean that they can interpret any set of scien-
tific data. Understanding how data was collected and understand-
ing the theory behind an experiment is essential for being able to
interpret that data. Scientists involved in looking at the evidence
from the CERN generator and interpreting it as 'nine atoms of
14 Creativity in primary science

antimatter have been produced' are unlikely to be any better than

a lay person at interpreting diagnostic ultrascans in the medical
field.

Having technical know-how

It is likely also that people who know some science have some
technical know-how as well and could well have practical hobbies.
They will be able to make some sense of technical and scientific
information which is just part of everyday life. They are likely to
feel at home with measuring instruments, and also with tools that
require good manipulative skills, but this of course is not auto-
matically the case.

Linking science and everyday occurrences

This may mean knowing how a thermostat works, or under-
standing the cycle of the sun and moon, or knowing why there
is concern about deforestation and the increase of the size of the
Sahara desert; or knowing where rain comes from, and really
believing that all the material on this planet is being continu-
ously recycled, even ourselves. They will not be too baffled by
medical information given them in routine medical checks, nor
by newspaper articles about the greenhouse effect. They may
know enough about the mechanisms of genetics to know how
corn seeds grow into corn and not tomatoes, and why sunflower
seeds grow into sunflowers and not a rose.

Appreciating the nature of science

People who are said to know some science are also likely to have
some appreciation of the nature of science, and some idea about
how such knowledge and explanations have been built up and
slowly accumulated over time. They will know that imagination
plays a large part in science — imagining the unobservable, ima-
gining how things might be different from common sense. They
will appreciate to some extent what counts as evidence in science,
and how arguments are put together. They may be aware that sci-
ence experiments in a laboratory are highly controlled events and
may not replicate the complex conditions that operate outside, so
 Science education — aims and research 15

that inferences from the former have to be made tentatively when

trying to illuminate the latter. They are also likely to recognize
that knowing about what the natural world does can be very dif-
ferent from knowing how what it does can be explained. Teachers
in particular tend to appreciate this; they have far more trouble
trying to teach about electric current and voltage than they do
about how to wire up circuits to get a lamp to light or a buzzer
to buzz.
They are also likely to recognize that while a lot of scientific
information is relatively certain there is a limit to that
a limited number of types of question that can
be answered within science.

Appreciating the cultural significance of science

Appreciating the cultural significance of scientific knowledge
requires some historical perspective, or at least a willingness to
recognize that scientific ideas taken for granted today have not
always been so. Most people are familiar today with the phrase
'spaceship earth', i.e. an earth as just one member of a universe,
not something distinct from the 'heavens'. The earth is accepted
as a place where you have only the resources which happen to
be on your spaceship. Newton, in recognizing that the behaviour
of the apple was governed by the same forces as the behaviour
of the moon, contributed significantly to our acceptance of the
earth as part of the universe, not separate from the heavens.
The recycling of matter, from water in the atmosphere to water
in our bodies, from the carbon in our tissues to the carbon dioxide
in the air, from the nitrogen in Aristotle's muscles to the nitro-
gen in broad beans today, owes much to the work of many chemists
down the ages. We are becoming increasingly familiar with liv-
ing with this idea of recycling, such that the cherished belief
of the uniqueness of the individual is understood today partly in
terms of the transmission of a unique pattern of information in
the genes, not as the uniqueness of the particular material in our
construction.
The ability in the twentieth century both to understand and to
intervene in the many processes which occur on 'spaceship earth'
has raised ethical issues of a dimension which was not faced before:
when to give medical treatment and when not; who should con-
trol the supply of spare parts for surgery; who should decide
16 Creativity in primary science

about fertility treatment; who should decide when and where cars
may be driven?.

Thinking about where and how science is learnt

Learning about science therefore is learning about what the nat-

ural world is like, what it does and what can be done to it. Learn-
ing about science involves learning how it can be explained and
coming to grips with some of the 'imagined entities' (current,
genes, electrons). It involves appreciating the way in which evid-
ence is collected, locating this knowledge within everyday events,
recognizing that science provides tentative answers to only a lim-
ited range of all the questions that people might ask, and being
aware that scientific knowledge and understanding are inextric-
ably linked to every other aspect of our culture.
Turning from what is learnt in science, to how and where it
is learnt, is important. Formal education in schools and colleges
will play a part but so will a range of informal learning outside
these institutions. The six years in primary school (the focus of the
case studies in Part 2) must be seen within a wider and longer
continuum of learning.

Informal learning
Much informal learning of science develops from just being in a
society where scientific knowledge exists, where technical equip-
ment and processes are available. Considerable knowledge is built
up outside formal education: through hobbies, through medical
encounters, through reading instructions on technical goods; by
knowing that certain things are possible (travelling round the
earth in a satellite, using mobile phones to all corners of the earth,
knowing that hips can be replaced, having water and electricity.
automatically in homes); by watching television programmes; by
reading books and magazines; by interacting with the material
world through construction activities; from science fiction.
By the time that children come to school they already have five
years of experience of finding out about the material and natural
world; they have encountered a lot of technical gadgets, watched
television, looked in books, asked questions and had a range of
responses, and come up with their own conjectures about some
 Science education — aims and research 17

phenomena. This informal learning will continue while they are

at school and interact with the science they learn there.

Formal education: learning in school

Formal education provides rather different contexts. The obvious
one is that activities are planned with the intention that learning
should be the outcome (learning may be the incidental outcome
of a trip to a museum with the family, but general motivation
and enjoyment may be the primary objectives). Time and physical
resources for learning science are allocated in schools; teachers
expect to play a significant part in the learning process by their
interactions with the learners.
It is difficult to give a general picture of what the provision for
science would be like in any school, especially at primary level,
despite the common framework of the National Curriculum. This
is partly because of the autonomy of schools and of individual
teachers to interpret the National Curriculum in their own ways.
It is also because schools and teachers have their own personal
histories; some schools have had science as an intrinsic part of
the curriculum for over 50 years, others have only reluctantly and
slowly incorporated it since 1989 with the implementation of the
National Curriculum. Similarly some individual teachers had incor-
porated the study of the natural world as part of their teaching,
since they started teaching; others are reluctantly coming to terms
with the requirements of a National Curriculum which has made
science a 'core subject', hence compulsory
The National Curriculum in science at primary level contains
some of the ten elements of 'knowing some science'. Children
are expected to learn about plants and animals as living things
which have the same life processes — growing, reproducing, feed-
ing, moving, respiring, etc.; about living organisms as parts of
communities within a particular environment and the interac-
tions of the different organisms within the environment; about
the properties, behaviour and structure of matter; about physical
phenomena such as electrical circuits, sources of energy forces,
sound and light; the place of the earth in the universe. The
National Curriculum gives an indication of the facts to be known,
the explanations to be understood and the concepts to be learnt
(DFE 1995).
Children are expected to learn how to undertake explorations
18 Creativity in primary science

and investigations and how to interpret data, from the actual

experience of undertaking experiments and investigations and
interpreting the data. Schools, by and large, have the necessary
resources and materials for children to engage in such practical
activities. These resources tend to be 'low tech' and apart from a
few items, are different in character from the equipment typically
found in the laboratories in secondary schools. Secondary sources
such as books, videos, TV are important for science, supplement-
ing the first-hand experience gained through practical work.
Something of the spirit of 'science in everyday life', 'appre-
ciating the nature of science' and 'appreciating the cultural sig-
nificance of science' is contained in the National Curriculum,
even at primary level. It is hoped that the involvement in finding
out about the natural world, through talk, listening, reading and
experimenting will allow these understandings to develop.
The National Curriculum stresses the importance of children
learning the vocabulary associated with science and the means
of representing and displaying data and information, using dia-
grams, graphs, tables and charts in order to communicate their
ideas. What gets almost no mention is the importance of learners
making their ideas and constructing their own meanings through
the use of language and pictures.
The case studies in Part 2 give an indication of what might be
found in practice within formal education and hence provide
examples of the way in which the National Curriculum can be
interpreted in the classroom. They provide glimpses of what learn-
ing in science can be like in the formal context of primary schools
and how that learning contributes to the picture of children 'know-
ing some science'.
Curricula, textbooks and case studies are not the only sources
of relevant information about teaching and learning science. Re-
search in science education, much of which has been directed to
primary science in the last 30 or 40 years, can also prove useful.
In order to tap this research resource I have drawn on published
reports from relatively large projects, namely: the Children's Learn-
ing in Science project, CLIS (Leeds University) and related studies;
the Science Process and Concept Exploration project, SPACE (King's
College, London and Liverpool University); Science Teacher Action
Research project, STAR (Liverpool University); the Assessment
of Performance Unit, APU (national); Procedural and Conceptual
Knowledge in Science, PACKS (York and Durham Universities).
 Science education — aims and research 19

Research into young children learning science

Rather than treat each of the ten facets of 'knowing science' sep-
arately I have grouped them into three main clusters: the first is
concerned with knowing and understanding facts, explanations
and concepts, and asking questions; the second with understand-
ing experiments, interpreting data and developing technical know-
how; the third with science and everyday life, the nature of science
and the cultural significance of science. To date, research has only
addressed the first two clusters to any significant extent.

Research into knowing about the natural and made

world; understanding explanations; developing
scientific concepts; and asking questions
Much of the research in this area has focused on how children
'picture' the natural and material world. How do they imagine
light? What do they imagine that it does and where it is? How
do they explain phenomena like how they hear the sound of a
drum, the growth of a plant from a seed, the drying of a towel,
the positions of organs inside the body...
Research on Children's Learning in Science began in the late 1960s,
and flourished in the 1970s and early 1980s. CLIS was the acro-
nym for the project at Leeds, but there has been work in this field
worldwide. It has provided a wealth of information about what
children say about a wide range of natural phenomena, what they
expect to happen, how they explain natural events, and their inter-
pretation of what people say or write about science. The research
began in the area of physics with secondary school students, but
has spread to other areas of science and to the primary phase
(Driver et al. 1985, 1994).
Extracts from a chapter by Gerald Nussbaum (1985) in a book
named Children's Ideas in Science (Driver et a!. 1985) will illustrate
the field. He writes about teaching 8 and 9-year-olds about the
earth in space. He starts by indicating the nature of the journey
that children have to make from the perceived world in which
they live (with a flat surface, with 'up' directly above their heads,
'down' directly below their feet, and the sky some considerable
distance above them) to the conceived world where the land on
which they stand is really the surface of a sphere, where 'down'
means towards the centre of this sphere and where 'up' is along
20 Creativity in primary science

a line going from the centre, outwards along a radius and sky is
all around them.
Amongst the tools for diagnosing where children are on this
journey, Nussbaum asked them to draw pictures of, or talk about,
the 'round earth'. He found that responses included reference to
curved roads, round mountains, a round island with sea all round
it, and a round earth in the sky with the observer standing on
a flat earth. He also set them problems where they had to draw
what will happen to a ball dropped at different places on the
earth's surface. Many responded by drawing the ball going down
the paper, not going towards the centre of the earth. Where
correct responses were given, he probed understanding further
(see Figure 2.1), to reveal that the egocentric view of the world
often still persisted.
Nussbaum identified steps in a progression from the egocen-
tric (the perceived world) to geocentric view of the world (the con-
ceived world), but he made no claim that everyone will follow
that route, nor how long it will take to make the journey. He does
claim that a teacher can make a difference in whether the journey
is embarked on and whether some of the more challenging parts
are tackled.
What also emerges from this whole area of research is that the
ideas are not confined to children. Ideas found in children can be
similar to those found in adults, including people who have con-
siderable formal science education such as science graduates.
A few more examples from other topics will illustrate the point.
Studies of children's responses to whether a cow, whale, spider,
worm or person is an animal or not, revealed that it is not until
the age of 17 years that nearly all children are prepared to recog-
nize that it is reasonable to classify a person as an animal (Osborne
and Freyberg 1985). This is not surprising because there are fre-
quently notices up which say 'No animals allowed in here', where
people are not excluded.
Questions about where water goes to when puddles disappear,
or blackboards reveal that the idea that water, once it has
evaporated, is somehow still around although invisible, is not
easily accepted. Questions about light reveal that many people
believe it travels further at night than during the day. This again
is not unreasonable because we might see a light such as a fire-
work from a distance of several hundred metres at night but not
during the day (Osborne and Freyberg 1985: 10).
 Science education — aims and research 21

(a) (b) (c)

(d) (e)

Figure 2.1 A problem situation presented in 'two steps' to detect

'hidden' egocentric views
The child is shown (a) and asked to draw, for positions 1—5 only, lines
representing how rocks would fall. Two common alternative responses are
given in (b) and (c). If the answer was as in (c) then (d) is shown and the
child is asked why the boy's shirt comes to the boy's face. (d) affects some of
the children who first responded correctly (c) and they see persons 6 and 7 as
standing upside down. Hence they later predict falls to be shown as in (e).
(From Nussbaum 1985: 176)

In the literature, there are a range of views as to the signific-

ance of these findings. I would list three:
• science is not a simple extrapolation of the observed world; it
is often far from common sense;
• there is a lot to be taught and learnt about a simple statement
such as 'the earth is round';
• it is important for teachers to listen to children (or any learner),
(and this often means deliberately constructing opportunities
for them to elaborate their ideas) so that teachers can appreci-
ate what understanding is already there.
The first point may help to explain why there is still a significant
number of primary teachers finding difficulty with the science com-
ponent of the curriculum. The OFSTED (1995) report on science in
the National Curriculum states: 'Some teachers' understanding of
particular areas of science, especially the physical sciences, is not
22 Creativity in primary science

sufficiently well developed and this gives rise to unevenness in

standards, particularly in Year 5 and Year 6' (pp. 5—6). I often
wonder if the difficulty lies more in not understanding the nature
of the knowledge than in the knowledge itself. Perhaps the relative
certainty of scientific knowledge, coupled with what at times has
almost become the dogma of 'learning from first-hand experience',
has slid over into an unconscious belief that science is obvious
and obviously learnt unaided from first-hand experience.
The second point, that there is a lot to teach about the earth
being round may seem trivial, but a response to having to teach
areas which are unfamiliar is to rush through telling the children
a lot of facts without allowing them to 'play' with these facts
mentally and see the consequences of the new ideas. Much of the
creativity I have talked about in the case studies relates to inter-
esting events and activities that have allowed children to see the
'not so obvious' in the apparently obvious.
I will illustrate the third point about listening and responding
appropriately with a conversation I had with a group of infants
who were studying the solar system. While they were looking at
a photograph of the earth taken from a satellite, I asked them
what the picture was. The four all replied that it was the earth
and they knew the photograph had been taken from a spaceship.
So I asked what the blue was, which was a question that might
not have occurred to me had I not read Nussbaum's work. A girl
replied that it was the sea, to which, after a short pause, a little
boy added 'No, it cannot be the sea because it is up in space.'
This was incidentally a boy who could tell me about the names
of the planets and quite a lot of factual information about them,
but he had not made the connection between the earth he stood
on and the earth he saw in a book.
Another relatively large project in primary science, one whose
acronym is SPACE, has provided more information about teach-
ing and learning science. The SPACE project (Science Processes and
Concept Exploration) drew on techniques from CLIS and from APU
to research the development of scientific concepts in children for
different topics, but it also tried to find out what sort of interven-
tion strategies helped to develop ideas. The team essentially used
a pre-test/post-test model of research, testing the children before
and after the intervention to see the extent to which ideas had
changed. Their 'tests' involved interviews with a selected sample
of the classes, but also analysis of products such as children's
 Science education — aims and research 23

writing arid drawings. They are referred to in the reports as 'elicitation

strategies' rather than 'tests'.
An important component of this research was that children were
initially given first-hand experience of a practical nature before
they were asked what ideas they had. These project reports give
details of these exploratory activities which are, in practice, a valu-
able resource for science teaching. They represent almost a 'play'
phase in the learning; the elicitation questions took place in the
context of these exploratory activities. For example, the explora-
tory activities on light are titled:

• Investigating where light comes from.

• How do bicycle reflectors work?
• Investigations with a torch and a mirror.
• Investigations with a torch and paper.
• Looking at candles.
• How do we see?

Details of the torch and mirror activity are given in Figure 2.2. It
starts with instructions for the activity, which is in fact a problem,
followed by a request for a drawing to show how the problem
was solved. Next comes a request for a drawing to explain how
the light travels (note that 'travelling' is not something which can
be observed but something which has to be imagined). Question
4 asks specifically about the direction of travel and question 5 is
pressing for a further explanation of the whole process (i.e. how

Equipment Torch for each pair of children

mirror
drawing paper and pencils

Activity
1 One child holds the torch which is switched on behind the second
child's head. The second child is seated and given a plane mirror. He!
she is asked to use the mirror to see the light from the torch.
2 Do a drawing to show how you used the mirror to see the light from
the torch behind you.
3 Show on the drawing how you think the light travels.
4 Is any light coming towards you?
5 How would you explain what is happening?

Figure 2.2 Torch and mirror activity and the related elicitation
questions (Osborne et al. 1990, Appendices)
24 Creativity in primary science

much of the story that the light is leaving the torch, travelling from
the torch to the mirror, bouncing off the mirror and travelling
into the child's eye, thus enabling him/her to see the torch, can
the child give?).
The progression which is evident in this series of instruc-
tions and questions is typical of many SPACE interviews. They
target specifically scientific ideas (in this case, light as an entity
separate from the source; light travels from source outwards; light
bounces off a mirror; seeing is associated with light entering the
eye), but they also provide the children with activities at the start
with which they can easily engage. The findings from the pre-test
were then reviewed in order to try to devise 'intervention strat-
egies', i.e. what and how to teach next, in order to develop the
children's thinking further. In many cases the intervention strat-
egy was an investigation based on questions children raised in the
exploratory phase.
In this topic they explored children's understanding of sources
of light and particularly whether they could explain secondary
sources; they studied the way children represented light and also
their explanations of vision. Only a minority could give a scientific
explanation of secondary sources, although there was an improve-
ment towards Year 6. Most children represented light by short rays
only, and even after the teaching did not extend the rays any dis-
tance from the source. In the matter of vision it was rare for chil-
dren to indicate the light coming from the source to the object
being looked at and then being reflected into the eye. Teaching
did make some difference as to whether children indicated links
of some sort between the eye and the object and the light source
and the object.
Topics in the SPACE project now cover light, earth in space,
earth, soils and rocks, electricity, growth, materials, sound, pro-
cesses of life, genetics and evolution, evaporation and condensa-
tion. These have provided a picture of the sort of understandings
achieved. I have included examples of findings from two of the
other topics, growth and evaporation and condensation.
In the research on growth, the project found that very young
children could name sun, water and soil as necessary for growth
but rarely named all three and viewed the soil as having a sup-
port function only. When a seed grew into a plant, they saw the
plant unfolding from the seed, not of it building itself up from
material it had taken in. Water was associated with growth and
 Science education — aims and research 25

many, even in the junior levels, thought that growth occurred at

night. As children got older they did become aware of the span
and limit to growth.
In thinking about the growth of a chicken inside an egg the
researchers found essentially four different interpretations: one
where children thought the body parts were separate and came
together just before hatching (this was found only rarely); a sec-
ond was the idea of the complete animal waiting to be hatched;
the third, and commonest, was of a miniature animal structurally
complete and feeding to make itself big enough to hatch; the
fourth, the transformation of the content of the egg into a struc-
turally refined animal was much rarer. Many children, not sur-
prisingly, thought intuitively that the egg would get heavier as
the chicken developed inside the shell.
In the topic on evaporation and condensation, several different
contexts were discussed with the children: the reduction of water
in a fish tank; clothes drying and a wet handprint on a paper
towel disappearing; and evaporation from solutions. In listening
to the children's explanations they found that the children used a
range of ideas concerning the conservation or non-conservation
of water; the change in location of the water; conditions or agents
governing change of location; and the nature of the transforma-
tion of water (Russell and Watt 1990a: 90). Often the younger chil-
dren saw no need to explain the disappearance of water, especially
in the case of clothes drying, or they explained it in terms of the
water falling to the ground. Older children were more inclined to
use a 'soaking in' explanation. The loss of water from the tank
was often interpeted by the youngest children as the water hav-
ing leaked away or someone having taken it.
Overall the project provides information for many of the topics
in the primary science curriculum, about possible explanations
teachers will meet and the likelihood of their being developed
into a more scientific set of ideas.
Moving from children's understanding to their ability at 'ask-
ing scientific questions' we find there has been relatively little sys-
tematic research on the scale of these other projects. There has
however been considerable thoughtful commentary on the sort
of questions that are needed for science (How many? How often?
How long? Which is the better/faster/strongest. .? What will
.

happen if. . ? How do you make something do something? How

.

does that happen? Why does that happen?) and also on ways of
26 Creativity in primary science

generating them in the classroom. In her account 'Helping chil-

dren raise questions — and answering them', Sheila Jelly wrote from
her experience of many different classrooms, about the sorts of
questions children ask, and the difficulty of using these product-
ively (Jelly 1985: 47—55). Often the very focused questions needed
for science are not asked spontaneously. She discusses how teachers
can work from children's spontaneous questions to what she calls
'productive' questions:
a child's curiosity often does not show itself as spontaneous
questioning, but rather as a statement of interests. 'Look it
(snail) has little eyes on stalks.' In situations like this, teachers
have to intervene in order to frame problems that children
can investigate in a scientific way: 'Are they really eyes?' 'Can
snails see?' 'How might we find out?' So in practice it is very
often a teacher's questioning, not a child's that initiates sci-
entific activity. For this reason any consideration of handling
children's questions in science must be closely related to the
way in which a teacher handles her own questioning.
(Jelly 1985: 47)
Jos Elstgeest has written extensively on the importance of 'en-
counters' between children and phenomena (Elstgeest 1985a, 1992,
Elstgeest and Harlen 1990) in enhancing their ability to ask ques-
tions, and much of his writing is about the sort of encounters that
intrigue and puzzle and hence encourage the asking of questions.
Elstgeest also gives an important reminder that questions may
not come in the verbalized form recognized by adults as questions;
someone picking up an object and looking at it in an interested
way is a form of question; someone pausing and frowning may
indicate that some sort of puzzle has occurred to them; a statement
said in a tentative voice may be a question.
Other writers who have focused quite extensively on the prob-
lem of helping children to ask and answer questions, bringing
together many of the strategies that teachers have found product-
ive are Elstgeest 1985b, Feasey and Thomas 1993, Ollerenshaw and
Ritchie 1994, Harlen 1995.

Understanding experiments; interpreting data

In addition to the research into children's ideas, and the comment-
ary on their asking questions, there has been considerable work
 Science education — aims and research 27

done in the field of children undertaking investigations. How do

they respond to evidence, especially that which is generated in
investigations in school? What do they notice? What do they see
as significant?
The Assessment of Performance Unit was established in the late
1970s as a national body to survey learning in several subjects,
including science, of 11, 13 and 15-year-olds. It produced ima-
ginative exercises to find out about students' knowledge and
understanding in science, their ability to make measurements, to
process scientific data and to plan and undertake investigations.
These exercises were used with several thousands of students.
This work laid the foundation of much of the early work on the
National Curriculum in science (DES 1989), as well as providing
tools for the assessment of science and, in the primary field,
information about what children could do and understand in
science at the age of 11 years (Harlen 1983). Analytical work on
the stages of investigations showed how performance in 'plan-
ning and doing' was much higher than in 'interpreting data and
evaluating'. It also showed the importance of context on the way
investigations were undertaken (a problem about the rate of dis-
solving of a sweet was tackled differently from the same problem
set as the rate of dissolving of sugar). The researchers also found
that conceptual understanding affected design of investigations
(Black 1990: 21) (children who believed that cloth keeps some-
thing warm by generating heat, tested materials for the best cloth
for wintry conditions by wrapping the cloth round a thermo-
meter). A review of the APU findings most appropriate for primary
schools (age 11) is given in Russell et al. (1988).
In the late 1980s STAR (Science Teacher Action Research) stud-
ied children in classrooms, using an observation schedule which
focused on the 'process skills' of science. In particular it tried to
pick up the effect of teacher intervention as well as build up a
picture of the processes in which children were engaged. At the
end of the first year the analyses of the results were shared with
the teachers, who subsequently focused their teaching to enhance
processes not being developed and who became involved in the
classroom observation themselves (teachers were paired for this).
The focus of much of the research was on how to assess children
while they are working, a task which many teachers find difficult.
The identification of the 'clusters' of processes which occur at dif-
ferent stages of investigations is useful in this context (Russell and
28 Creativity in primary science

Harlen 1990: 84, 85), because the clusters show that there is no
need to be observing all the processes at the same time. ('Start up
cluster' comprises observing, hypothesizing, planning, raising
questions, measuring; the 'planning and doing cluster' involves
planning, doing, critical reflection, measuring, manipulating vari-
ables, observing and recording; the 'interpreting cluster' involves
recording, interpreting, communicating — critical reflection, hypo-
thesizing can lead to new investigations. See Figure 2.3). In addi-
tion one of the spin-offs of the research for other teachers is
the collection of examples of what a hypothesis, prediction, etc.
looks like from a 9-year-old's point of view or, indeed, from any

OBSERVING > HYPOTHESIZING

>PLANNING
I
MEASURING RAISING QUESTIONS

Start up' skills cluster

PLANNING

I
CRITICAL
'J/ REFLECTION
DOING

MEASURING MANIPULATING OBSERVING

RECORDING

'Planning and doing' skills cluster

(new investigation)
4'

HYPOTHESIZING

CRITICAL
I REFLECTION

COMMUNICATING

The 'interpreting' cluster of process skills

Figure 2.3 Clusters of skills in investigations (Russell and Harlen

1990: 82—4)
 Science education — aims and research 29

age-group standpoint that is recorded in the books (Russell and

Harlen 1990).
One of the findings of this and other research (subsequent
work at Durham (Foulds et al. 1992), and antecedents in the APU
work), is that while children undertake investigations, they do
not, as a rule, record data, measure carefully, consider their evid-
ence, try to use their evidence to answer the question, nor evalu-
ate their methods, without intervention from the teacher. A book
that gives ideas of how to help children develop these skills is
Rosemary Feasey's and Anne Goldsworthy's book on investiga-
tions (Goldsworthy and Feasey 1994). It has a range of exercises
closely related to investigations, which a teacher can use to help
children think about aspects of an investigation without the
teacher having to generate the information themselves.
A further more recent project, PACKS (Procedural and Concep-
tual Knowledge in Science), investigated the approaches children
take to investigations, as well as the development and evolution
of these approaches over the age range 8—13 years. The phrase
'procedural knowledge' acknowledges that the notion of evidence,
the notion of a fair test, should be treated as knowledge that has
to be understood. It explored how the way in which children
tackle investigations (i.e. proceed) is linked to their understand-
ing of the procedures and to their conceptual understanding of
the topic in hand (Millar et a!. 1994). PACKS devised 'concept
and data probes' related to each investigation. The concept probes
find out about children's concepts related to the subject and have
similarities with material used to elicit pupils' ideas such as in the
CLIS and SPACE project. The data probes judge pupils' ability to
interpret data, to decide whether differences between measure-
ments are significant or not, and in what circumstances repeated
measurements should be made.
One important element of the PACKS research was the categor-
ization of investigation modes that children adopt, which were
described respectively as:
• the engagement frame
• the modelling frame
• the engineering frame
• the scientific frame.
These can be illustrated by reference to one of the problems,
'Cool bag', in which children had to investigate how the thickness
30 Creativity in primary science

of padding affects how well a cool bag works. In the engagement

frame children do something with the equipment that is provided
but what they do bears little relationship to the question. In the
modelling frame children make something which visually resem-
bles features of a problem rather than relating to significant vari-
ables; in this case they selected equipment and materials that were
as near as possible to the shape of the cool bag in the picture. In
the engineering frame they used the material to make the best cool
bag they could. In the scientific frame they took measurements
for different numbers of layers of cloth and made decisions about
how the thickness affected the inside temperature.
As so often happens, analysis like this raises awareness of events
seen but not registered. 'That's fascinating,' said a teacher who
had read the PACKS report, 'only yesterday I saw an example of
the modelling frame where a child made a horseshoe magnet out
of Plasticine and couldn't understand why it wouldn't work.'
And other teachers have said, 'Yes, that's right, people get on
with an investigation — especially if the equipment is there — but
often tackle it differently from the way you expect or answer a
totally different question.'

Research and teaching

The link between research and teaching is elusive and yet all the
teachers involved in these and other research projects found that
their practice in the classroom was significantly altered as a result.
Below is an extract from the SPACE project:
Teachers had commented in an earlier meeting that the role
expected of them was one that they were not used to. The
work required that teachers should be less judgmental than
normal and gave children an opportunity to discuss and
express their ideas without criticism from the teacher. In
addition, the emphasis placed by the project on conceptual
development was one that was unfamiliar to the teachers.
Osborne et a!. 1990: 31
The involvement in research of the STAR project was reported by
all the teachers to be of value in understanding what they were
aiming for in their classes and being able to identify significant
events and products. The detailed analysis of the process skills,
 Science education — aims and research 31

with an indication of ways of judging progression in them were

much valued.
Many of the teachers used as 'testers' for the APU practical
tasks similarly reported the way in which the involvement and
training as researchers had increased their ability to notice events
which were important indicators of the children's learning, which
they would previously have missed.
I think that it is no coincidence that several (but not all) of the
teachers whose case studies appear had read reports of research
of this kind. The reading helped alert them to the significance of
what children were saying and to techniques which they could
use to elicit and extend understanding.

Summary

The research in science education provides insights into the con-

straints and possibilities in learning science in primary schools
which we can use to view the case studies. What happened in the
classrooms may replicate the findings of the research; they may
conflict with the findings. Where research shows certain areas of
learning as difficult, then it is important to see how teachers
have managed to support children in that learning and the extent
to which they have had success.
The goals of science education also provide a framework
through which to view the learning; does the science taught in
these schools relate to this wider interpretation of science educa-
tion or has primary science some other agenda?
Part 2
CASE STUDIES
 3
Parks, woods and wastelands
YEARS 3 AND 4 (7 TO 9-YEAR-OLDS)

The jigsaw of teaching

Writing about classroom practice proved more challenging than

I had anticipated when I embarked on this book. A first attempt
at this chapter produced a chronological account, with comment-
ary and rationale, which was accurate and informative, but dull.
Eventually I came to use the metaphor of a jigsaw puzzle to guide
the writing, because it seemed to me that I often learnt about other
people's teaching rather like someone finding the picture in their
puzzle: piece by piece, building up a section here, one there and then
finding pieces that linked one section with another, until finally
almost all the puzzle is complete save for a few pieces which lie
unnoticed on the table. At the end these last stray pieces fit effort-
lessly into empty spaces and take on new meaning.
The pieces for the jigsaw of this chapter were collected in sev-
eral ways. First, the teacher, Anne Robertson, had presented many
of them in her written account and analysis of her teaching. All
otherwise unattributed quotations are from this source. Second,
36 Creativity in primary science

a conversation with her two years later when I started writing this
chapter provided further pieces. Third, I learnt at that time that her
current Years 3 and 4 class were studying the same topic and that
she was using many of the ideas she had developed previously.
I therefore visited her class and stayed for over an hour photo-
graphing events, displays and the wildlife area in the grounds.
Fourth, having omitted to photograph 'Professor Sense', a key player
in the drama, I returned to record him and inevitably to find
more pieces. Fifth, the first draft of the chapter was given to the
teacher who corrected it and added more linking pieces.
Metaphors have their limits. It is impossible to collect, let alone
present in the space of a small book, all the linking pieces in the
jigsaw of teaching. In this class were 28 children aged 8 or 9
years old, each with their own histories and personalities. Con-
versations and relationships between them, and between them
and their teacher, are part of the jigsaw which, save for a few
instances, have not been and cannot be captured. There is the
personal professional history of this particular teacher, the ethos
and the history of the school, the families from which the chil-
dren come; all are pieces which are relevant but in the main unre-
ported. The reader must imagine or at least surmise about them.

An overview of the topic

I have provided a chronological outline of the whole of the topic
at the end of the chapter in Figure 3.7. The reader, like the person
who chooses to turn the lid of the jigsaw for guidance, may find
it helpful to turn to these pages occasionally and fit the episodes
into the whole picture. The organization of the outline into five
stages, each subdivided into 'planning' and 'assessment', is the
teacher's and not mine; she was interested at the time to research
and reflect upon the interaction between planning and formative
assessment in her teaching.
There are references in the text to groups A, B and C. Group
A contained children who were still having difficulties in read-
ing and writing and on the whole were slow in learning. Group
B had reasonably developed reading and writing skills, but were
less articulate than C. This latter group were confident and fluent
writers and readers and could put ideas into spoken words with
considerable confidence.
A park, a wood and a wasteland were within easy reach of the
 Parks, woods and wastelands 37

school. The wasteland available was a piece of derelict land (20

metres by 10 metres) behind the cinema not far from the school.
The park was within ten minutes walk, while the woodland, Epp-
ing Forest, was five miles away, where a coach trip was necessary
The teacher's objectives were that children should become more
knowledgeable and inquisitive about the local environment, that
they should be able to ask and investigate their own questions,
and that they should develop their knowledge and understand-
ing both of living things within a range of habitats and of the
interrelationships between living things.
She spent five to six hours a week on the topic for half a term,
giving about 40 hours of teaching altogether. Much of the devel-
opment of language, maths and art were merged with the sci-
ence, so the five to six hours covered more than science. There
was no science topic in the second half of the term; the 40 hours
was, therefore, the time devoted to science over the whole term.
The pieces I found in the jigsaw were classroom stories, interact-
ive displays, visits to the park, woodland and wasteland, assess-
ment schedules, pro formas for investigations, letters to the council
about rubbish on the wasteland, concept maps, a box which the
teacher kept knocking on to the floor thus spilling its contents,
pictures of two professors, databases on invertebrates, drawings
of minibeasts, a heap of questions asked by the children, chil-
dren's own investigations, a lot of knowledge about living things
and their habitats, conversations about the topic rich in language
and detail, and the children's growing confidence that their ideas,
questions and reflections were a valued part of classroom life.
The teaching can be viewed in five fairly classical stages:
• brainstorming;
• early explorations, with children beginning to generate ques-
tions and extend their knowledge;
• further disciplined activities during which a rich variety of
questions were generated by the children and answered by
book research;
• practical investigations to find answers to five questions from
first-hand evidence;
• consolidation of learning by exploring a more complex environ-
ment — Epping Forest.
By the end of the third stage (the phase when a lot of questions
were generated, see above) the teacher had achieved her objective
38 Creativity in primary science

that the children should be able to generate good questions; there

were 29 good focused questions which indicated a considerable
breadth and depth of knowledge. This is impressive by any stand-
ard. The story now tracks back to the start of the topic to see how
she led up to this point.

The start of the topic

During the initial brainstorming the teacher had asked the whole
class to talk about what they thought would be in the topic, and
which parks, woods and wasteland they had seen or visited and
what they had noticed there. Not surprisingly she found that they
knew the wasteland to be a place where people dumped rubbish
and where children were told not to play. The children often vis-
ited the local park to play on the swings and climbing frames, but
had noticed little else there. None of the class had visited a wood
or a forest and some muddled 'wood' with 'would'.
She asked the class to think of questions they might try and
answer when they visited these places. There were not many;
some about what sort of rubbish people dumped on the waste-
land and a few about the playing equipment such as: 'How high
is the climbing frame?' 'How many steps are there on the slide?'
Most of the latter led to mathematics investigations rather than
science.

A classroom story and a sensory visit

The first 'sensory visit' to the park was planned and imminent,
with the requisite number of other adults booked to go with the
class. Productive visits, however, need more than administrative
organization: they need the children to be mentally prepared for
the exploration ahead. This triggered the telling of a story and
this is how it went:
Professor Sense
One Monday morning, the headteacher told all the children
during assembly that they would be having a special visitor
coming to their classroom that day.
Later that day the door of our classroom opened and there
 Parks, woods and wastelands 39

stood the most unusual man that the children had ever seen.
He smiled, walked in, sat down and invited all the children
and the teacher to come and sit beside him. At first, the chil-
dren stared at him. What they noticed most of all were his
eyes which were very large and round. They seemed to be
moving round and round slowly all the time. It was almost
as if they were on stalks. Next, they noticed his ears. They
seemed to move towards the slightest sounds around the
room. The children felt vibrations which seemed to come
from these. As he spoke to the children, his nose twitched
like a rabbit's. Sometimes he crumpled it up as if he didn't
like what he could smell. Every now and then, his tongue
appeared from between his lips and he seemed to be tast-
ing the very air that they were all breathing. The children
noticed that his hands were big and firm but they looked
very gentle.
The children were fascinated by this unusual person. As
they listened and watched they felt their eyes tingling, their
ears vibrating, their noses twitching and their tongues begin-
ning to water. They looked at their hands to see if anything
was happening to those and they noticed the lines that they
had never seen before.
'Who are you?' asked one little boy. 'I am Professor Sense,'
said the unusual visitor, 'would you like to learn with me?'

The story, like many classroom stories which teachers use for
explanation, would not have been written down if it were not
for the fact that she was researching her own teaching at the
time. It was a story which fascinated and intrigued; the children
responded enthusiastically to the request that they should draw
Professor Sense (Figure 3.1).
Sitting on the grass in the park the teacher reminded the chil-
dren of Professor Sense and asked them to use all their senses
while they were touching the grass. They sustained this in almost
complete silence with little difficulty for ten minutes; the tape
recorder was then turned on and each child invited to share some-
thing sensed. The things that the children described were mostly
about the grass — the scratchiness on the back of their legs, that
there were several little bits joined together at the bottom of the
blades of grass, descriptions of 'waving greenness'. Then the ques-
tions began to emerge:
 0v
S

Figure 3.1 Children's drawings of Professor Sense

 Parks, woods and wastelands 41

EA asked 'Is all the grass the same?'

Some children answered, 'Yes' while others replied, 'No'.
They then all looked at me. I waited and looked as if I was
thinking. Then an idea was expressed.
AG 'We could find out.'
EA 'How?'
SO 'I know, we could all look about and pick one bit then
bring it back and put them together and check.'
AC 'Oh yeah, can we try that?'
The teacher has come to recognize that this sort of scenario occurs
frequently. It can often lead to group discussion, investigation and
research, providing she sticks to her role of:
• waiting for someone else to come up with a response to the
first question;
• allowing the children to explore their suggestions at the appro-
priate level;
• making some response to the discussion in hand, e.g. 'I won-
der if there are more types of grass in other places?';
• refraining from extending their knowledge immediately, e.g.
by saying that there are innumerable types of grasses that grow
in all sorts of different habitats.
She reported:
These, for me, are vital points in the children's development.
First, they have the possibility to think and to believe in them-
selves as having valuable responses. Second, it encourages
them to explore ways of finding answers. Third, it allows
them to discover the limitations in their investigations, if they
are able to, while being respected and not put down. Fourth,
it discourages an attitude of believing that the teacher or
another adult has all the answers.
During the subsequent search for different grasses, more specific
questions were framed and more detailed observations made:
'Are they all grass?' 'Why has this got like little flowers?' 'This
one is browny and all those are green' 'These ones are all long',
etc. The discussion finished with one child saying: 'Well, there
must be different sorts so there's not just grass all the same. Does
grass get into books, Miss?' The teacher confirmed that she thought
they had books with grasses in, at which one child, a non-reader,
42 Creativity in primary science

asked if they could take grasses back 'to see if our grass is in a
book'. (A small selection of grasses were taken back with the appro-
priate explanation as to why this was permissible when plants
should not normally be picked.) This child subsequently spent a
long time on several occasions pouring over a book matching up
the grasses and wanting to read the relevant information, asking
other children to read certain paragraphs for her.
Sorting grasses into various groups, discussing the different
characteristics which distinguished one from another, was one
task undertaken back at school. This requires attention to small
detail as differences between one grass and another are not easy
to spot, even though the flower heads on the grasses at that time
of the year would have helped.
I pause in the narrative about the teaching to focus on the class-
room. Primary classrooms generally look attractive with children's
work on the wall, but displays can contribute more to learning by
being interactive. My recent visit to the classroom revealed sev-
eral interactive displays intrinsic to the teaching. By then another
Professor Sense had been introduced and was one of six interact-
ive displays.

Interactive displays and another classroom story

The teacher was keen that all displays were ones which require
some interaction from the children. There were six of this type in
her classroom:
• woodlands
• Professor Question
• folders for categories of questions
• research questions, next to the books
• park designs
• Professor Sense.
The woodland display comprised a large board on which the
children stuck their drawings so that a collage of the many living
things in a woodland was slowly built up during the topic. An
early task was for each child to cut out a tree shape, paint one
side as a tree, but write on the other side their ideas about woods
and woodlands. These were pinned by one corner only so that the
children could turn them over periodically and see for themselves
 Parks, woods and wasteiands 43

how much they had progressed by reviewing how much more they
now knew.
Professor Question was a small box pinned to the wall by the
computer, where every now and again a child went and wrote a
question, printed it out and 'fed' it to the professor. The display
included the words 'How? What? When? Why? Who?' as prompts
for starting questions. Only three weeks into the topic I found, in
the class I visited, that Professor Question had already been 'fed'
those listed below:
How does a snail make its shell?
Is a ladybird a bird?
How many legs has an insect?
What is a caterpillar?
Do earthworms feel dry or wet?
What does an earthworm eat?
What do ladybirds eat?
When do ladybirds get their spots?
What are aphids?
Is a spider an insect?
How many sorts of butterfly can you get?
How many legs has a spider?
Is an ant an insect?
Can a fox eat a bird?
Does an ant lay eggs?
and by the end of the topic she had been fed far more.
Who was Professor Question? She, like Professor Sense, was the
figment of the imagination of the teacher, who created her after
the success of the story of Professor Sense. This is her story which
depicts both the interaction between observation and questioning
and how questioning provokes questioning:
Professor Question
All of a sudden, one day, the classroom door burst open. A
very unusual person stood there almost as if on one leg and
asked, 'Hello. Have you seen my friend? We seem to have
lost each other. Now, where do you think he can be? Can
you help? I am lost, you see. Can you tell me which way I
should go next?'
One girl nearby said, 'Who are you looking for?' A boy said,
'Where do you want to go to?' The teacher moved across
44 Creativity in primary science

the classroom and asked, 'May I help you? Have you been
to the office?'
'You may help me if you can, but can you?' replied the
unusual person.
'I don't know. Who are you looking for? What do you
want?' asked the teacher.
The visitor looked very confused.
The teacher tried again, 'Have you been to the office?'
'Where's the office? Who will I find there? How do I get
there?' replied the visitor.
By this time, the teacher looked confused too and the
children thought it was a huge joke. The teacher put on a
disapproving look. One child, trying to be helpful, asked
'Who are you? Maybe, if we know that we can help you.
Who are you?'
At this point, the visitor's face lit up with excitement. 'I
can answer that one,' the visitor exclaimed, 'I am Professor
Question. Do you know me? Does that help you to help me?'
Another child called out, 'Professor Question! That's unu-
sual. Is that why you keep on asking questions? Who is your
friend?'
'Oh dear! You're all catching it, aren't you?'
'Catching what? Is it like measles?' asked another child.
Just at that moment, the classroom door opened again and
in walked the children's old friend, Professor Sense. 'Oh, here
you are, Question. I wondered where you'd got to. Getting on
OK? Pleased you've met my friends. Are they looking after
you all right?'
'Please, can someone tell me what is going on?' asked the
anxious teacher.
'This is my friend, Professor Question. Usually, we go about
together most of the time, you know. I tell her things. She
asks questions, don't you dear?'
'Yes, I certainly ask questions. But I don't know about you
telling me things. You notice things most of the time, don't you?'
'Yes, that's right. I notice them and I tell you about them
and you start asking questions about them and then I have
to notice more and tell you and then you ask...'
'Yes, yes,' interrupted the teacher, 'I think we've got all
that now. Now, where can we go from here?'
At that point the children burst out laughing.
 Parks, woods and 45

The story helped to reinforce what was meant by a question; the

classroom display with its signs saying 'How? When? Where?...'
was a reminder of words which often signal the start of a question.
The teacher's provision of folders for different types of ques-
tions, labelled respectively 'To find out we can watch', 'To find out
we can read', 'To find out we can investigate', are an undisguised
adoption of ideas that classifying questions should follow col-
lecting questions from Feasey and Thomas (1993). The decision
about which categories to use was made as part of a class dis-
cussion on ways of finding out answers to the questions, and is
another example of an event devised to enable the children to
play a significant role in decisions.
The children were in mixed-ability groups for the classification
exercise, in order to give 'groups A and B the opportunity of con-
tributing their ideas while benefiting from the reading, writing
and investigative skills of group C, and to encourage group C to
receive ideas and suggestions from the others and to help them
clarify their thinking and planning as they explained it carefully'.
This classification exercise revealed that questions could often
go into more than one category — eventually groups had to decide
in which category the questions should go. The questions them-
selves generated a lot of discussion and helped the children clarify
their understanding and knowledge of both the content of the
questions and of the processes of finding out. The teacher reported
that what was becoming evident by this stage was a growing
acceptance by the children of there being more than one way of
doing things, of the possibility of more than one right answer,
and a recognition that some questions may not be able to be
answered by the class with the time and resources that they
had available. Discussions in the classification exercise generated
further questions, such that the collection and classification of
questions became concurrent rather than sequential activities. The
folders were fed by questions on a regular basis over a week; ques-
tions were also removed as children found answers to them from
their reading.
By the side of the reference book collection were three lists of
questions devised by the teacher. These were, on the whole, either
more difficult than some of the ones the children were asking, or
they extended the areas studied. They were primarily for the
older children (this class had two year groups in it, Years 3 and 4),
or for those who were working faster than the others.
46 Creativity in primary science

One wall contained a large display of park designs for dif-

ferent groups of people (girl of 5, 8-year-old boy, woman of 38,
older person). There was an invitation to the children to select
the most appropriate design in each category and to sign their
names against the ones of their choice. These designs were a devel-
opment of a map-making exercise which children undertook on
their second visit to the park, as a result of which they developed
an awareness of the park as a very varied environment, with grass
areas, flower beds, bush areas. The play area was only a tiny part
of it all.
Professor Sense had been developed further into an interactive
box. This box became a repository for 'sense sentences', i.e. any
statements which described observations (for example, 'the road
is noisy'). The teacher had also told the story to an infant class
and made Professor Sense into a 'feely box' for them.
Interactive displays of the sort described here allow children
to engage in an activity over time, to view their progress by watch-
ing displays grow (question box; question folders), to reflect and
make up their minds without being hurried (decisions about the
park), and to have something to do if they complete work quickly
(questions by the side of the reference books). They also provide
the teacher with the opportunity to start an activity in a formal,
controlled way with the whole class together, while accommodat-
ing subsequently the different learning speeds and strategies of
the children in her class.
In the case of the questions, the display matched the way in
which questions often arise from other activities, and as it was
there waiting to be fed, a child did not have to break off from
something else for long to feed in the question. The close observa-
tion and building of a database were two of the activities which
stimulated the production of questions.

Close observation and building a database

The drawings in Figure 3.2 and the information tables on mini-
beasts (Figure 3.3) came from two closely related activities. The
teacher used work on minibeasts to develop children's observa-
tional skills. The study was highly structured in many ways. The
children had collected minibeasts from the park and from the
school grounds and these were kept in a tank in the classroom.
Children selected one and were asked to:
48 Creativity in primary science

• draw the minibeast;

• write five facts about it, from observation;
• share observations with others.
Drawing is a form of investigation — it holds the drawer's
attention and makes them look and re-look endless numbers of
times. Detail of how and where one part is joined to another is
noticed, the relative lengths and numbers of parts, the shapes
and colours. The children used magnifying glasses to see and
understand detail, and observation grids to help them get relat-
ive sizes sorted out; they used various media to portray these,
e.g. pencil, charcoal, pastels and paint.
It is always impressive how much people learn about some-
thing from drawing it, so that writing five facts about the cre-
ature afterwards was relatively straightforward.
The teacher's role is also important in asking questions, notic-
ing features, developing observations and knowledge, e.g. 'I won-
der what those antennae do? They're moving all the time.'
The activity of sharing the observations required children to mas-
ter appropriate descriptive language and to realize the value of
numerical description (How many legs? How long is the animal?).
Through the sharing of observations the children discovered that
first, accuracy was important and that second, if comparisons
were to be made between one animal and another, or observa-
tions checked between two observers, then the characteristics
described had to be common to them all. The need for accuracy
came from cases of disagreement, such as one group claiming
that a woodlouse had eight legs, while another group claimed
that it had six. The disagreement led quite naturally to going
back and having a detailed look at the woodlice.
Building up a database on the computer, where specific descrip-
tors had to be put in, reinforced the need for describing the same
characteristics. Selecting characteristics on which to comment was
relatively easy as they were drawn from the various characteris-
tics that different groups had chosen to record. The list eventually
used was:
number of legs
wings
antennae
body parts
segments
 Parks, woods and wastelands 49

length
width
area
weight.

While the children were undertaking this observational work,

the teacher drew attention to life cycles and asked them to research
from books the life cycles of the animals they found. The class also
followed the development of a colony of caterpillars that they
found in the school grounds.

Classification box — the need for repetition

Figure 3.7 at the end of the chapter shows that classification of

animals was introduced during the third stage of the teaching.
The box that the teacher kept 'accidentally' knocking on the floor
was the 'classification box', containing pictures of animals, which
needed resorting as a result of the 'accident' — an interesting way
of building in the need for repetition in learning.
What might be taught about classification to children of this
age? Probably that it is useful to group animals with sufficiently
similar characteristics so that it is possible to know something
about the group without knowing about every individual within
the group; and that groups can be divided into subgroups. What
is also important is that much of the classification which is used
for biological material uses types of life cycle as well as structure
to separate out different groups. Hence learning about life cycles
was necessary for learning about classification.
The teacher introduced the idea of classification from the work
on databases, which had enabled the children to spot similarities
and differences between animals. What they found particularly
difficult was the idea of groups within groups. She devised a
series of boxes, Russian doll-style, so that when children were
sorting animals into groups, they could first divide them into
two big groups (vertebrate and invertebrate) and then into smaller
and smaller groups. Inside the vertebrate box, there would be
smaller boxes for mammals, fishes, birds, amphibians and reptiles.
A picture of a dog would then go into the mammal box, which
would be put in the vertebrate box.
Once the set of boxes had been established and a few games
50 Creativity in primary science

had been played with the whole class, the children benefited im-
mensely from it. It became the source of much discussion, many
questions and several games. The speech therapist used it on sev-
eral occasions in order to encourage children to describe animals
using characteristics which enabled another child to work out
which animal was being described. The children invented many
games themselves. The use of scientific terminology improved;
children used words like 'insect', 'arachnid', 'mollusc', 'inverte-
brate' accurately, without hesitation, and were able to compare
groups by their characteristics.

Children talking — cooperation

The teacher in this case study places a high value on children
learning to communicate well orally and to cooperate with other
people. She builds opportunities for these into as many activities
as possible. Her organization is such that she frees herself to be
able to talk to and listen to the children.
She monitors progress in talking and reported that children
were eager to talk about their pictures of Professor Sense and
explain why they had put various features in them:
Members of group A each spoke several consecutive sen-
tences in an animated way to me about their ideas. They
asked to share it with a parent who works with them each
day. Later in the week when the speech therapist came for
this lesson, they repeated the same request. They do not
. .

like speaking and have been worried by it in the past.

When three boys presented their drawing of a cross-section of
the tube of a trapdoor spider in its hole, she asked them about
the shape of the hole. 'What would you use if you wanted to
make a model of it?' 'What is that shape called?',.. etc..

The tape which the children had started on their first sensory
walk to the park was often replayed and added to during the
topic. It is not easy to do this in a busy classroom where other
noises can interfere with the tape. The teacher organized recording
by individuals during the 20-minute silent reading period which
they had every day after lunch. One child was allowed to go into
the teacher's cupboard and record, during this period, without
disturbing the class and without extraneous noises being picked
up by the microphone.
 Parks, woods and wastelands 51

Investigating their own questions

The teacher had set as an objective that children should invest-

igate questions that they had generated themselves, i.e. ones that
they were likely to understand and to be interested in. The class
selected five investigable questions:

• Where do worms like to live?

• What makes a good home for an ant?
• What lives in a tree?
• What flowers do bees like best?
• What leaves do aphids like to eat most?
and each group chose three to investigate.
The detail from 'Where do worms like to live?' has been used
here to show the sort of investigation that was achieved and also
how the teacher enabled the children to make as many decisions
as possible, themselves. The children decided to select three areas
and find out in which one they could find the most worms. They
chose a soil area; the grass; and in the bushes in front of the school
car park. They had to be taught how to get worms out of the
ground, by pouring on a very mild soap solution, but apart from
that the planning was the children's.
One group at a time went into the school grounds. At the plan-
fling stage just as the first group was going out, one child asked,
'When do we have to come back?' As on many other occasions
the teacher handed the responsibility for the decision to the chil-
dren. 'How long do you think you need?' was the reply, and the
group had no difficulty in setting a sensible time limit. Then finally
before they left she asked for a prediction: 'Have you any idea
where you will find the most worms?' The answer from three
children was 'On the grass', and from the other three 'In the soil'.
They argued that they would not find worms in the bush area by
the car park because of the 'smoke from teachers' cars'.
It was not long before one of the group returned asking for
measuring equipment to ensure the areas used were the same in
the three locations. The need for measuring had become appar-
ent while they were on the job. What was particularly valuable
about this was that children from groups A and B were able to
explain to the next group how to make the measurements.
The actual findings were that the bush area had the most worms,
52 Creativity in primary science

the soil next and the grass least. The teacher prompted a discus-
sion of why that might be and the children willingly offered sen-
sible and plausible explanations. 'Perhaps children in the area
affect it. We think that perhaps worms don't like children, but we
do not know what they do like. Can we try it in the park on our
next visit?'
As already mentioned, the teacher is particularly skilled in
having time to talk with children about the work in hand. Very
few of her conversations with children are about organization.
She therefore plays an essential role of 'lifting thinking' by ask-
ing probing questions. She encouraged children to discuss what
they were doing and thinking at every stage and asked questions
which helped them clarify their ideas. The investigation became
a series of events, each one followed by discussion. For the next
few weeks a pattern continued of planning, discussing; invest-
igating, discussing; recording and evaluating, discussing.
Because the groups had to undertake three investigations the
teacher noticed that during this time:
• children developed a method of writing their plan systematic-
ally;
• they grew in independence of thought and action;
• their hypotheses became more detailed and reasoned, e.g. 'I
think that ants prefer to live under logs because other animals
that eat them can't find them as easily as on a tree';
• they recognized more easily when they were not answering
their original questions;
• they became more confident about methods of recording;
• they were more able to evaluate their methods of working.
They seemed to grow to trust that they would not be told off if
they said that the work did not go well and became confident to
search for reasons and to share these reasons.

Letters to the council

The personal involvement and understanding that was generated

in this topic resulted in the writing of letters to the council about
the state of the wasteland, which incidentally was later cleared of
most of the rubbish.
 Parks, woods and wastelands 53

Consolidation
The visit to Epping Forest was the culmination of the project. The
autonomy of the children by this time was such that they decided
beforehand for themselves which of their questions they were going
to follow up in the woodland and what investigations they were
going to do. They prepared the necessary data sheets. It rained that
day, but nevertheless the visit went ahead. Data sheets had to be
put away on the coach, as a result, and they 'went on an adven-
ture'. They were fascinated by fungi, especially on fallen trees —
and asked lots of questions. They enjoyed the atmosphere; they
often stood and listened and watched quietly. Many animals —
fox, squirrel, innumerable frogs — were seen and they did several
investigations but they had to remember data. They acknowledged
the inaccuracy of this procedure later in their written accounts.
Several offered explanations for their findings, e.g. 'I think I
found more worms because there was good soil for them, plenty
of places to hide from their enemies, and not many people walked
there so they did not get squashed much.'

Formative assessment

Assessment checklists
To help keep frack of the children's development, in both their obser-
vation and investigation skills, the teacher devised the checklists
shown in Figures 3.4 and 3.5. The observation checklist focuses
on the level of detail which is observed, the use of the senses, the
skill with a hand lens, the ability to group similar observations
in a classification exercise, the ability to describe observations in
words and drawings, and the ability to recognize patterns. The
scale from 'beginning' to 'competent' is useful because it implies
skills and understanding that grow over time.
The investigation checklist requires little comment — it has all the
stages of an investigation (see Chapter 2) and allows the teacher
to record both oral and written contributions from the children.

Considering questions
Any classroom product (writing, speech, drawings, models, actions)
provides useful information if the teacher is able to be analytical.
54 Creativity in primary science

OBSERVATION CHECKLIST

Beginning Developing Competent

Observes gross features

Observes detail

Observes fine detail

Observes differences

Observes similarities

Uses all relevant senses

Observes sequences of events

Can use a hand lens

Can sort and classify as result of observation

Can describe observations

Can recognize patterns in observations

Figure 3.4 Observation checklist

The questions, for instance, that children wrote soon after Pro-
fessor Question was introduced provided useful insight into their
development at that point. Group A could ask questions but not
write them down. Their questions tended to be fairly general:
'What animals do you find in the park?' 'What can you see in a
forest?' 'Why is there a forest?', which indicated that they needed
more experience in simple observations in order to build up a
better knowledge of these places. Group B asked similar questions,
mostly concerned with the difference between parks, woods and
wastelands, but they could write. Group C were already asking
questions of a more specific nature about life in the places, sev-
eral of which had the potential to lead to investigations: 'What
do trees do for us?' 'Why do ants like trees?' 'What is soil?'.

Concept maps

The concept maps shown in Figure 3.6 were drawn in July near the
end of the topic, and again were a product that gave feedback to
 Parks, woods and wastelands 55

INVESTIGATION CHECKLIST

Beginning Developing Competent

HYPOTHESIZING
Mentions 1 relevant feature in explanation

Mentions> 1 relevant feature

Gives a logical explanation

PLANNING
Aware of fair test

Identifies appropriate variable

Identifies keep same

Identif lea equipment necessary

MEASURE
Makes comparison

Uses appropriate unit

Takes adequate measure

INTERPRETATION
Offers related to data

Checks new data

Notices pattern in data

RECORDING
Clear, consistent method

Accurate oral

Accurate written

Use of chart/graph

EVALUATE
Can offer improvement

Notices flaws

Figure 3.5 Investigation checklist

56 Creativity in primary science

Figure 3.6 Concept maps (draft)

the teacher about what the children understood and what they
could put down in writing and drawing that expressed their
understanding.

Development of knowledge

I asked the teacher to describe the concepts she had hoped to

develop and the sort of understanding she thought the children
have of each concept. Below is a summary of her response.

Life cycle: Each group of animals 'wants' to continue, so they

have to have babies which will grow up. By the end of the topic
children were able to talk about the life cycle of several animals
which they found.
The notion of life cycle became extended to plants, with chil-
dren slowly realizing that many of them had seeds or some other
structure which grew into the next plant — trees have come from
seeds; bulbs grow into next year's plants.
Classification: To begin with children classified animals according
to external features, so that birds and butterflies were put together
 Parks, woods and wastelands 57

because they could both fly, worms and slugs were paired together,
because of the similar shapes of their bodies. Cats and dogs were
put together because they were pets. The more they researched the
animals the more they were able to identify other features which
were similar. Snails and slugs were seen to be related. Cats and
dogs were put into a larger group of mammals as animals that
give birth to live young as opposed to laying an egg. They learnt
that insects are a large group of animals, all of which have six
legs. They also learnt that for invertebrates it was useful to record
information about legs, wings, antennae, body parts, segments,
size (length, width, area and weight).
Diversity of living things: Grass was obviously the first eye-opener
here; there was more than one type of grass, and then when the
children looked carefully, a grassy area was made up of many
plants other than grass. The diversity of minibeasts found was
impressive (several sorts of spiders, caterpillars, ants, woodlice,
slugs, snails. ).
. .

Habitats:Children became aware that different things lived in

different places, so that animals living under a log are differ-
ent from those living in the pond. The problems that they had
with the inter-habitat animals which could be found at two places
(e.g. a frog) made them realize that habitats were not tightly
bounded.
The park was seen at the start as 'a place to play in' but by the
end of the topic was seen as a place with many habitats (the
grass, the borders, etc.).
They started with the idea that a tree was just a tree — and
ended realizing that under the tree, on the tree, up there at the
top were different habitats for different creatures.
Needs/characteristics of living things: The fact of animals needing to
eat and to breathe and to move to find the things they need was
not too difficult. The idea of plants needing food is more difficult.
Children of this age can believe that a plant gets much of what
it needs from the soil (water in particular) but not that it needs
something from the air. They cannot see the air let alone have
an idea that it is made up of different components (although the
fact that many children have asthma and hayfever makes them
aware of things, such as pollen, in the air which might cause
their breathing difficulties).
58 Creativity in primary science

Food chain: This is a difficult idea. They often get so carried away
drawing a food chain that imagination takes over from reality.
(People eating dogs and dogs eating eagles...!) However, once
when the class had snails on the ground and there were birds
circling overhead, one child said 'I wonder if they are coming for
the snails and want to eat them?' — so some notion of food chain
related to first-hand evidence was registering.

Decay: The children understood this as a long slow process, re-

cognizing that things changed over time, e.g. horse droppings.
They looked at things that people dropped: some decayed, some
did not.

Summary — one morning's visit

There are many pieces to this jigsaw. They fit together and rep-
resent a highly developed and well thought-out teaching plan.
There was, however, something almost unremarkable on enter-
ing the classroom. The class were working busily and relatively
quietly when I visited. The children had all watched a video tape
first thing in the morning about animals in various habitats and
about animals building homes at specific times. Several were busy
answering questions about the tape from the information books.
One group was drawing a trapdoor spider from a book and dis-
cussing what the book said about it. Many were on the maths prob-
lem associated with leaves, and every now and again a child
would go and collect a leaf from the school grounds. Once in a
while a child would get up and write a question for Professor
Question, print it off and feed it in. Some children completed
paintings of trees or leaves and left them to dry. At the end of the
morning the children tidied the books away, organized their desks
and left for play. Two tearful arguments had also been sorted out.
The teacher moved systematically from group to group working
alongside the children and moving their thinking forward at
every opportunity.
When I returned again two or three weeks later, the parks
poster had been replaced by the work on minibeast acrostics and
several of the other classroom displays had been changed — show-
ing an ever-changing educational environment for the children
in this class.
 Parks, woods and wastelands 59

Postscript — the development of an environmental

area in the school grounds

Between 1993 and 1995 the teacher instigated and developed a

nature area within the school grounds. This was an area 20 metres
by 10 metres which she transformed from a grass patch with
three or four trees to a rich resource. It contained mown and
unmown areas, a wood pile, a pond, a rocky mound, the original
trees with other boundary trees added, and paths covered in
wood bark which allowed access to the different parts with mini-
mum disturbance to the habitats. It provided the one green area
in this otherwise harsh asphalt environment, overshadowed by
West Ham football stadium.
Figure 3.7 Charts summarizing the teaching and assessment of the topic

1st stage: planning 1st stage: assessment

Teaching/learning/assessing objectives Knowledge/concepts
• assess children's observational skills • parks: a place where there are things to play on
• listen to children's ideas conceprning the topic • woods: unable to be distinguished from 'would'
• listen to what children would like to learn about • wastelands: a place where people dump rubbish.
• encourage them to ask questions about the topic and note them down
Observation revolved around specific objects, i.e. things to play on in the
• listen to strands that could lead to investigations.
park, piles of rubbish that they are told not to go near.
Resources/events
Initial questions about play equipment led to maths investigations. Also, what
• display pictures of forest, trees, woodland, mammals and minibeasts; sort of rubbish?
• show children's reference books;
Previous experience: Nobody had visited a wood or forest.
• put out collection of pooters, magnifying glasses, hand lenses, trays, dishes,
pots.
(to be changed regularly, throughout topic, with the children's work)
Figure 3.7 cont.

2nd stage: planning 2nd stage: assessment

Teaching/learning/assessing objective Knowledge/concepts

• use observation skills while visiting a park. awareness of five senses (from Professor Sense story)
there is more than one type of grass
Activities planned
parks have flower beds, grass, bush areas as well as play areas.
• share objective via story of Professor Sense
Observations (sitting on the grass, remembering Professor Sense)
• draw Professor Sense
• visit local park for sensory visit scratching backs of legs
• revisit local park to draw a map of it little bits joined at the bottom
• listen to strands that could lead to investigative work. • waving greenness
• flower beds, grass, bushes, paths, play areas (mapping and visit).
(observations in park taped/added to as topic progressed)
Questions generated
• is all grass the same?
• how can we find out?
• does grass get into books, Miss?
Figure 3.7 cont.

3rd stage: planning 3rd stage: assessment

Teaching/learning /assessing objectives Asking questions

• extend children's observational skills • all keen to ask questions; 29 generated after few days
• develop questioning skills • basic questions from group A (oral) and B (written and oral); more specific
• explore possibilities within questions ones from group C.
• listen for hypotheses in order to develop them
Classification of questions
• introduce idea of classification of animals
look in detail at one minibeast • To Find Out: we can watch; read; investigate
• develop their understanding of life cycle • accepting more than one way of doing things
• look at wasteland opposite school — list contents and classify as helpful! • generating questions from others' ideas
harmful. • some questions could not be answered by class
• hypotheses emerging.
Activities planned
Answering one question from each type; planning how to answer
• share objective — story and drawing of Professor Question
• collect questions; classify questions (classification negotiated with children); Deepening observational skills
answer questions
• drawing minibeast; writing five facts; sharing observations
• describe/share descriptions of minibeasts
• understand need to use same characteristics for database
• make a database from descriptions
• introduction to classification Knowledge/concept
• classification games.
• life cycle of their minibeast (reference books)
• classification of animals (need for classification games to understand this).
Figure 3.7 cont.

4th stage: planning 4th stage: assessment

Teaching/learning/assessing objectives Five investigations (each group did three)

• use questions decided on by children to develop observation and question • where do worms like to live?
skills, knowledge, research and investigative skills • what makes a good home for an ant?
develop hypotheses offered — discuss in light of further investigation and • what lives in a tree?
research • what flowers do bees like best?
assess ability to plan an investigation • what leaves do aphids like to eat most?
• assess their awareness of fair testing
Detail from 'Where do worms like to live?'
• assess the means that they use to measure, record, interpret and commun-
icate their findings • three areas chosen: soil; grass; bushes by car park
• assess any ability to evaluate or reflect on their work and communicate • taught — how to get worms out of the ground
their findings. • pupils from groups A and B (slower learners) explained the task to next
group
It was noted that children:
found method of writing plans systematically
grew in independence of thought and action
hypothesized giving increasing detail and reasons
• recognized more easily when they were not answering their original questions
• became more confident about methods of recording
• were more able to evaluate methods of working and confident to report if
work did not go well.
Figure 3.7 cont.

5th and final stage: planning 5th and final stage: assessment

Teaching/learning/assessing objectives Visit to Epping Forest

Assess the children's ability to plan an investigation that they want to carry • it rained so data sheets had to be put away on the coach and children
out in Epping Forest 'went on an adventure'
• fascinated by fungi, especially on fallen trees — and asked lots of questions
During the day
enjoyed the atmosphere and often stood and listened and watched quietly
assess the children's observational skills
• saw lots of animals — fox, squirrel, innumerable frogs
• assess their ability to carry out their investigations.
• did some investigations but had to remember data — acknowledged this
After the visit inaccuracy in their written accounts.
• assess their ability to display their findings
'I I
think found more worms because there was good soil for them, plenty of
• assess their interpretations
places to hide from their enemies, and not many people walked there so
• assess their ability to communicate and to evaluate their work.
they did not get squashed much.'
 4
Rabbit's House
YEARS 1 AND 2 (5 AND 6-YEAR-OLDS)

This chapter provides a window on a small piece of science teach-

ing which was spread over only two weeks, and which comprises
essentially one investigation. I have attempted to capture the way
in which the teacher progressively focused the children's invest-
igation, from an early exploration stimulated by a story to an
investigation in which children could acquire good quality data.
The teacher's attention to the thinking as well as the doing in-
volved in the task, and her organization of successive groups in
the class working on the investigation are documented.
The class was a Years 1 and 2 class (most of the children were
6 years old) in a school in Hackney in north London. The teacher
shared with myself and a colleague several pieces of work, three of
which are shown in Figures 4.1—4.3, and I pressed her to explain
her accompanying teaching. For reasons which I have mentioned
before, i.e. the almost intuitive 'unconscious' nature of teaching
for an experienced teacher, I had to probe for what she regarded
as obvious detail not worth mentioning. From this I built up an
account which now forms this chapter and which is summarized
 Rabbit's House 67

A
c<1
In
A
P eb5U!
'I —

LoO Kt O..I'Q
U I
wrc±e
0.1!
L
4
oc' We took turns to make a sound in Rabbit's House.
o.N I used two shells and pencils. The pencils were
web! W2(22
hard and the shells were the easiest. We looked at
our chart. We wrote all of the things I have just
Là 4 written now. The ones with lots of X were hardest
and the ones with were goodest.

Figure 4.2 Written account and drawing from L in Group 4

t $itl 4

4
We are doing Rabbit's House. I

found out the pencils were the

easiest.
A

t
Figure 4.3 Written account and drawing from A in Group 4
68 Creativity in primary science

in Figures 4.4 and 4.5. The account and summaries have been used
in my teaching, in both pre-service and inservice courses, and many
teachers have found they have enabled them to gain an insight
into the implementation of exploration and investigation with
young children; hence the decision to include this case study in
the book. As with other chapters the first draft was read by the
teacher and amendments made in the light of her comments.
The quality of the pieces of work and of the accompanying
table was what first attracted my attention, and provoked me to
find out about the teaching which had generated it. The work was
from relatively young children (5 and 6-year-olds). The accounts,
like the two shown were well set out, showing some evidence
of chronological writing, factual reporting, and interpretation of
data (Figures 4.2 and 4.3). The table (Figure 4.1) has the results
clearly presented with proper labels, titles and a key to explain
the significance of the ticks and crosses. The drawings show the
experimental set-up within the classroom.
Even from just the two accounts, drawings and the table it is
almost possible to piece together the details of the investigation.
The children were investigating how easy it was to identify the
sounds made by different objects. They had six pairs of objects
— two shells, two pens, two buttons, two plastic numbers, two
pencils and two crayons — and a large box which had been made
into 'Rabbit's House'. The two children whose work is shown
had worked in a group of four; one child was the subject who
had to sit outside the house and try to identify the source of the
sound. The other children selected one of the pairs of objects and
banged them together to make a sound inside the house. If the
child outside identified the source correctly a tick was recorded
on the table and if not, a cross was recorded.
The table of data (Figure 4.1) was the element of the children's
work which fascinated me most initially. It has all the features of
a good table in that it conveys most of the information about the
investigation. It has a title showing what the results refer to; the
key explains what the symbols mean; and it is set out so that ini-
tial interpretation is relatively easy. We can, for instance, see that
the noises from the shells and pens were identified more often than
not; and that the noises from pencils, buttons and crayons were
not easily recognized. The fact that it is drawn on squared paper
means that if the results were inserted as the children were doing
the experiment, they could keep track of what they had done, and
 Rabbit's House 69

see the pattern of data as it emerged. The original table was on

a sheet of Al size, clipped to a painting easel, so that the children
could easily fill it in. It also had the advantage that others nearby
could notice the results as they emerged, and it was also large
enough for the teacher to hold up for a class discussion.
The drawings (Figures 4.2 and 4.3) show that the children were
organized round a table, with the house on top of the table. The
child listening to the sounds is on one side, and from the drawings
we can see that this person had his/her back to the house. The
chart is large and on a flipchart stand, as shown in L's drawing.
L shows the sound 'dcl' being made on one side of the house.
Before looking at the children's writing which contains their
interpretation of the results, it is worth examining the data to see
what sense can be made of it. The shells were used in the invest-
igation more times than any of the other objects (17 times) and
the crayons were used the least (five times). It was not very easy
to identify the sounds — there is no case where the sound was
identified correctly right the way through. The proportion of
number of times that the objects were guessed correctly could be
regarded as giving an indication of how easy they were to iden-
tify. The objects come out in the order: pens; shells; numbers;
pencils; buttons and crayons (67, 59, 43, 20, 14, 0 per cent, respect-
ively). Obviously the idea of proportion will not be accessible to
children of this age; it is more likely that they will spot where there
are more ticks than crosses or the other way round, and that they
will notice where there are lots of ticks and lots of crosses. Hence
the shells rather than the pens may be identified as the best, and
the pencils rather than the crayons as most difficult.
In turning to the children's writing we find that L (Figure 4.2)
reported that 'the pencils were hard and the shells were the easi-
est'. Another child from the same group reported at the more
general level 'that it was quite difficult to guess the noises'. Other
children reported that the shells and pens were easy and the pen-
cils were hard. A reports 'I found the pencil was the easiest'. This
may in fact be true in that this could be a report of his personal
finding (i.e. he himself found the pencils easiest and got them
'right') rather than an interpretation of the total evidence. The
fact that none of the children mentioned the crayons and that the
crayons were not used much may indicate that they were not that
interested in them and forgot about them. Perhaps the rather dull
sound of wax crayons contributed to the lack of interest.
70 Creativity in primary science

One child explained how her interpretation fits the data by the
use of the word 'because', stating that 'the pencils are hard to do
because the pencils had more crosses and the pens is easy because
they had more ticks'. The change in handwriting in Figure 4.2
indicates that L added her explanation, 'The ones with lots of x
were hardest and the one with were goodest', at a later stage,
possibly in response to the teacher asking 'How did you know?',
or to class discussion of what was found.
Several children mentioned 'taking turns'. Cooperation had been
a key learning intention on the part of the teacher (alongside data
recording and interpretation). The reason for repetition in science
is only slowly understood (see Chapter 2) and one child's comment,
'we got it right, so I did not go to have a go again', indicates lim-
ited understanding at this stage.
Examples of the children's work clearly showed their differ-
ent stages of development. The task, in the way it was organized
and supported, had allowed for differentiation in the outcome.
The drawing and writing does not, however, show how the chil-
dren organized themselves. A, in fact, played a key role in organ-
izing the group, which emphasizes the importance of different
methods of assessment to give a whole picture of a child. L, on
the other hand, whose work is shown in Figure 4.2, giggled most
of the way through the investigation because there happened
to be someone making a video of the classroom that day, and in
her case the written record revealed far more than the teacher's
informal observations!
Given these features I asked the teacher for detail of the sequence
of teaching, to explain how she had introduced the investigation,
why it was called 'Rabbit's House', and how she had enabled rel-
atively young children to produce and record data of considerable
quality.
The investigation had started with a Masai story about Rabbit's
House (Verna Aardema (1978) Who's in Rabbit's House?) in which
Rabbit goes away from his house and when he returns he finds
someone in his house: 'And a big bad voice from inside the house
roared, "I am the Long One. I eat trees and trample on elephants.
Go away! Or I will trample on you!" Rabbit is frightened and
does not know what to do; slowly one animal after another (Jackal,
Leopard, Elephant, Rhinoceros) comes to the house and each time
the same thing happens; they offer to use their strength in various
ways to get the Long One out but all would involve the demolition
 Rabbit's House 71

STORY Who's in Rabbit's House (Masai story)

QUESTIONS Could we recognize each other's voices?

Could we deceive each other?

DISCUSSION Generated ideas and strategies e.g. standing behind the screen,
hands in front of face, listening on other side of the door

EXPLORATION Tried out ideas informally — found that it was difficult to tell
Let's try to investigate Rabbit's House — two children offer to
make the house

IDENTIFY A Problem
FOCUSED What noises are easy to identify?
PROBLEM How shall we do the investigation?

DISCUSSION What could you use to make the noises?

Should we have many things?
How will you organize the activity?
What shall we record?
How shall we record?
Suppose we start, what are the difficulties we are likely to meet?

SKELETON PLAN Skeleton plan — list of objects to be used

Hit two together to make a sound
Record in chart like this

REMINDERS TO Remember to make a prediction , . decide which ones will be

.

FIRST GROUP easiest to identify

Remember to sort out about taking turns

Figure 4.4 Summaries of the first two class discussions

of Rabbit's House, which Rabbit forbids. Eventually the frog, who

has been offering to help from the start, is eventually allowed to
try. 'Frog said "I am the spitting cobra! I can blind you with my
poison! Now come out of that house, or I'll squeeze under the door
and spit poison into your eyes." At which point a small caterpillar
comes out of the house and Rabbit is able to enter.
The initial discussion of the story focused on what makes us
afraid, but the teacher followed on by raising the questions of
whether it was possible to recognize someone's voice if the per-
son speaking could not be seen and whether it was possible for
people to disguise their voices so that someone who knew them
well could not identify them. This was one of the crucial points
of the teaching. The two questions were drawn directly from the
72 Creativity in primary science

Week 1 Story and early investigation whole class 1

Rabbit's House is made two pupils

Week 2 Whole class discuss design of the investigations whole class 2

Day 1 Group 1 do investigation (two hours) group 1

Day 2 Group 1 show data to class

Whole class discuss communication and decide results whole class 3
would be better on squared paper and with labels
Group 1 transcribe results to squared paper group 1
Group 2 undertake investigation (am.) using group 2
squared paper
Group 3 undertake investigation (p.m.) using group 3
squared paper

Days 3 and 4 Groups 3, 4 and 5 undertake the investigation with no groups 3, 4, 5

further help
Groups 1, 2 and 3 write about what they had done groups 1, 2, 3

Day 5 Writing and drawings completed for all groups

Start of Discussion of findings whole class 4

week 3 Shared writing for a class book

Figure 4.5 Summary of organization of teaching over two weeks

shared experience of the and were within the understanding

of the children. The class were intrigued by them; some children
offered ideas from their previous experience, while others were
prepared to admit that they were not sure. The teacher quietly
slipped in the question 'What could we do to find out?'
The children suggested that someone could go behind a screen
or outside the door so that he/she could not see who was speak-
ing and then try to identify the speaker in the class. They also
suggested putting hands in front of the face to disguise the voice
of the speaker. These were tried informally, and in some cases
they did find it difficult to identify the speaker, but the class
as a whole was not sure that there was conclusive evidence, so
further investigation was necessary. The discussion ended with a
decision to explore Rabbit's House more carefully, and two girls
offered to make the house out of a cardboard box.
The reading of the story, the subsequent discussion and the
informal trying of the experiment all took place with the class
sitting as a group 'on the carpet' with the teacher as discussion
leader, and it took about an hour.
 Rabbit's House 73

When the house was made, the teacher again set aside time to
discuss the planning of the investigation with the whole class.
The first task was to focus the problem and to decide how to go
about finding an answer to it. The question selected, What sounds
are easy to identify?', is relatively straightforward and very close
to the question used in the first informal exploration the previ-
ous week. This was important because the investigation the chil-
dren eventually undertook was a refinement of a 'practice run'.
The children were able to suggest that they would have to make
different noises and that someone who was not watching would
try and guess what made the noise.
With older children it might be possible to leave them at this
point to design the investigation but younger children need con-
siderable support. Like other teachers quoted in this book, this
teacher aims to give children sufficient guidance to enable them
to get started, but to leave some parts slightly open ended, so that
the children have to address the problems as they come to them.
In this case she questioned them about methods of making
noises, equipment that could be used ('What could you use to
make the noises?' 'Should we have many things?'), organization
('How will you organize the activity?'), what to record ('What
shall we record?'), and how to record ('How shall we record?').
In her teaching, she was not telling the children what to do, but
helping to identify for them the things they needed to think
about so that they had to make the decisions themselves. More
importantly she expected children to listen to and evaluate each
other's suggestions.
After some time a skeleton plan emerged to which the whole
class had subscribed. The children were to use six pairs of class-
room objects to hit together and they would record their findings
on a chart. (Figure 4.6 shows this chart, as it was completed by
the first group). The objects would be hidden in the house and
one person would be outside listening, with another person choos-
ing which pair of objects to use for the sound. Crosses would be
used to record wrong identification and ticks, correct identifica-
tion. They would work in groups.
When most of the important decisions were made she used the
question 'Suppose we start, what are the difficulties we are likely
to meet?' She used this often to give an opportunity for last-minute
thoughts and questions about procedures, and to make the chil-
dren think ahead.
74 Creativity in primary science

Aq S
Our
We —
#o X — and
HarrAesf
Shefts k-

'
(R.
(

v Cr

io

Figure 4.6 Initial recording chart from group 1

The first group to start work on the investigation was given

extra advice in the form of further things to think about and do:
'Remember to make a prediction — you have to decide first which
ones you think will be easiest to identify' and 'Remember to sort
out about taking turns.' This first group worked for about two
hours and produced a chart with lots of ticks and crosses.
The record of the data from the first group displayed on the
chart was shown to the whole class at the start of the next day.
 Rabbit's House 75

The teacher asked the other children to look at the results and
decide what it told them. Questions about the meaning of the
ticks and crosses led naturally to the idea that it is useful to add
explanation by means of a key. The children also found that try-
ing to make sense of the numbers of ticks and crosses turned out
to be tedious because they were jumbled up. 'What could we do
about it?' The suggestion that squared paper would be better
emerged; with the ticks on one line — one per box — and the
crosses on the adjoining line. This process of identifying and
sharing a problem with the whole class and requiring the chil-
dren to sort it out is an important strategy. The improved method
of recording on squared paper was used by all subsequent groups.
This little episode gives an example of one of the loose ends which
had been left from the initial planning, and which was used very
productively as part of the teaching.
The leaving of this loose end was not an accident. The teacher
deliberately chose to do this, knowing that it would raise issues
about ways of recording, and about the ways that facilitate inter-
pretation of results. She attaches a high importance to allowing
children to make mistakes and learn from them. She explained
further that it was part of 'the process of learning why we use
particular forms of charts or tables, rather than just seeing tables
as a convention'.
Before looking at the subsequent set of events, it is worth noting
that by this point there had been three substantial elements of
whole-class teaching which had taken place. The first one focused
on trying out an early exploration; the second developed the explora-
tion into a more systematic investigation with detailed plans for
procedure; the third evaluated and improved the method of re-
cording. What can be seen in action and in context here is the
explicit teaching of the different stages of an investigation.
The third discussion also helped to remind subsequent groups
about what they had to do when it was their turn to collect data,
so that group 2 took over the equipment and did the investiga-
tion with little further help from the teacher. At the same time
group 1 transferred their data on to the new form of chart and
realized as they were doing it that a pattern was emerging that
they could see quite easily. The first and second charts of group
1 are shown in Figures 4.6 and 4.7 respectively. This reorganizing
of the chart is reported in the writing of one of the children in
group 1:
 Rabbit's House 77

People couldn't see how many ticks and crosses there was,
so we had to do another one. We had to do them in a straight
line.

A fuller description and explanation is given in the class book on

the project which is put together jointly by the teacher and the
children. The captions accompanying the charts in the book are:

This is the first chart we made. It was hard to see what we

had found out so we did another one.
When we made a new chart we marked off each tick and
cross as we did it on the new chart so that we did not get
in a muddle.
This is the second chart we made. We decided the squared
paper would help us to make partners of the ticks and crosses
and see if there were more ticks or crosses.

There were five groups in the class successively undertaking the

investigation and then drawing pictures and writing about it; the
sequence of work is shown in Figure 4.5. The groups were not of
even size: groups I and 2 comprised three children each, group
3 eight (which split into two for carrying out the investigation,
hence their spanning two days for the investigation, but all data
was put on the same chart), group 4 had four children (this is the
group whose work is shown in Figures 4.1,4.2 and 4.3), and group
5 nine (again this group divided as group 3 had done). Obviously
while children were not working on some aspect of Rabbit's House
they were engaged on other learning activities. (See Chapter 7
for one teacher's mechanisms for organizing several tasks in one
classroom.)
The teacher now moved to the last of the whole-class discus-
sions, which reviewed everybody's findings and brought ideas
together for the 'class book', which is literally a book the whole
class make together with the teacher and which records the work
from a particular study (more details of it are given below). The
focus of this discussion was the tables of data — all of them, in-
cluding the first one which had been modified. This latter point
is important; children will easily dismiss early attempts which
they regard as 'wrong', and yet it is in the process of improve-
ment that some of the best thinking is done. Unless the teacher
78 Creativity in primary science

shows children how to value these early attempts as an intrinsic

and essential part of learning, an important contribution to the
children's growing confidence will be lost. The extracts from the
class book given above concerning the charts were written by
the teacher from what the children in the first group told her.
Questions such as 'What was the problem with the first chart?'
'How did you make sure you did not get in a muddle when you
went from one chart to the other?' 'Why did you use squared
paper?' 'How did it help?' will evoke such responses.
The teacher explained: 'The purpose of this was also to com-
pare the findings across the whole class, using the charts to see
if any general patterns could be seen. I asked them to look for
similarities and differences between the charts, rather than just
recounting their experiences and memories of what they did and
found out.'
The role model of the teacher in reviewing what has been
learnt is an important part of this last phase of the teaching. It
values the thinking as well as the doing of the investigation. This
is the summary found at the end of the class book:
We talked about the What's in Rabbit's House? game:
1 We thought we should do each sound a number of times.
Most of us did the shells the most.
Christopher thinks we kept on doing shells because we
liked getting it right.
2 We noticed if we did the game for a long time we got
good at it.
3 Most people found the shells were the easiest.
4 Some people found the bricks were the easiest.
5 Some people thought the buttons sounded like the shells.
The production of the class book is also part of the teaching. It
shows how books are put together; it has a front cover with a
title and author on it (What's in Rabbit's House? by Orange Class)
and an illustration, one of the children's pictures. The front cover
is made slightly larger than the inside pages; it has the spine
strengthened and is covered in tacky-back to keep it clean, as it
will be handled by many readers.
Inside is the introductory page on which is written: 'We made
sounds in Rabbit's House and tried to guess what they were. We
drew pictures, did some writing and made some charts to show
 Rabbit's House 79

what we did and what we discovered.' Then we find the charts,

drawings and writing from each successive group. The chart first
and then each child has typically a two-page spread — the writ-
ing is on the right, with the drawing and the typed version of the
writing on the left. None of the children's writing has corrections
on it; the teacher merely asked the children to read out the writ-
ing to her and she typed it out with adult spelling on the com-
puter. She uses their own writing diagnostically to decide what
is the next area to develop for that particular child.
One of the charts was drawn by the children themselves, which
was noted as part of the story: 'F, V and J made this chart all by
themselves. They decided to use the bricks as well.' One child's
writing shows another little decision that had to be made in
carrying out this investigation: 'if they guess it wrong they can't
have another guess'. There is more evidence of interpretation in
the form of seeing a pattern in data: 'We got more ticks than
crosses for everything.' There is evidence of willingness to share
predictions and findings even if they were different, and to give
a reason for why some sounds were hard to identify: 'When I
was playing in Rabbit's House, I thought the bricks were the
easiest but they weren't. The shells were the easiest. When it was
my turn I did a hard one, the bricks. The bricks sounded like the
pencils so the bricks were hard.'
The class book ends up as a 64-page book — with a beginning,
middle and end. The work of all the 27 children in the class is
included. It holds, in an attractive and robust form, much of the
children's thinking alongside their work, for perusal later. Class
books were made for all topics and they became some of the
most popular reading books for the children, either on their own
or in groups of two or three, who could often be found discuss-
ing aspects of their previous work as they read through the books
together.
Before closing this chapter, I am including a few comments
about helping young children to participate in discussion, and
about the organization of this teacher's classroom.
Sustaining whole-class discussions for up to an hour with young
children is not achieved without explicit teaching and practice.
This teacher gave the children specific training to help them to
recognize the importance of listening and of allowing someone
to finish speaking; she had an object (it happened in her class to
be a large conch shell) that was passed to the speaker; the child
80 Creativity in primary science

holding the shell was allowed to speak; others who did not hold
it had to listen. Her own actions and responses were also import-
ant because of the role model which teachers provide for their
pupils. She had to listen carefully and to give careful considera-
tion to what each child said. Her use of questions to extend their
thinking, many examples of which are in the text, is part of the
key to her success — 'Can you tell us a bit more about that?' 'How
did you do this?' 'What shall we do about this problem?'
Good classroom organization is crucial. In this teacher's class-
room, the position of resources are carefully organized and main-
tained, so that children know where things are and little time is
wasted on giving out equipment and resources. Daily routines, car-
ried out by the children for maintaining and checking resources,
play an important role in helping children to take responsibility
and to feel a sense of ownership and pride in the environment.
Above all it releases the teacher for more important interactions
with the children.
 5
Ourselves
YEAR 2 (6 AND 7-YEAR-OLDS)

This case study comes from a school in west London. The design
of the displays, making the classroom look like a well-organized
'Aladdin's cave' full of treasures, first caught my eye and prompted
my request to the teacher to include her work. The Pine class scient-
ist (Figure 5.1) epitomizes the activities in which the children
were engaged. (Classes in this school are named after trees, hence
the 'Pine'.) I found examples of observational and illustrative
practical work as well as an investigation; measurement leading
to data collection; data interpretation; use of information books
and videos to find information to support first-hand findings; sys-
tematic research to solve a real problem; and the involvement of
the local community in the topic.
The material for the chapter was collected by photographing
(towards the end of the topic) the classroom and the adjoining
sections of the corridor, by talking with the teacher, by studying
children's work, by examining the teacher's written records and
by the teacher reading and amending an early draft of the chapter.
The topic of Ourselves was taught from the beginning of January
82 Creativity in primary science

Figure 5.1 The Pine class scientist

 Ourselves 83

to half-term in February, i.e. about six weeks. It took up most

of the time, each and every day, for those six weeks so it had to
carry nearly all areas of the curriculum. Some cross-curricular
aspects are apparent in the description that follows, but by focus-
ing on the science much of the detail of other subjects has not
been included.
Within the area of Living things, which was the topic specified
in the school's planning grid, the focus of Ourselves and the
even narrower foci of What are the parts inside our bodies? and
What do they do?, as well as The needs of living things, were
selected by the teacher for the study. The children had previ-
ously studied Ourselves in the reception class (4 to 5-year-olds),
but had focused on external features and senses. More recent
work had covered minibeasts and growth in plants, and it was
this that had partly determined the focus on human beings as
examples of living things. The teacher was not sure at the start
how much she would cover in the time, but in the event, the
needs of living things, the skeleton, the respiratory system, the
heart, the brain were included, as well as the idea of diversity
within human beings (height, shoe size, skin colour) and growth
and change. Of these, the brain was not something which the
teacher had envisaged teaching; its inclusion was instigated by
the children.
A lively feature of the classroom was the Pine class busy body
— a life-size cut-out which hung from the ceiling of the classroom

and acted as a summary of the work covered. Each new part of the
body learnt about was added in words on one side of the figure;
on the reverse side were drawings of the parts of the body, added
systematically as the topic progressed. By the end, cut-outs of heart,
ribs, lungs and windpipe had been attached at appropriate places;
the brain had been stuck on; bones, muscles and blood vessels
had been drawn in. The words written on the body were used in an
adaptation of the song 'I have a busy body, a very busy body, and
it goes everywhere with me. And on that body, I've got a. .

with verses such as 'I've got a body, a very busy body, and it
goes everywhere with me. And in that body, I've got a heart, and
it goes everywhere with me. With a bump thump here, bump,
thump there, bump, thump, bump, thump everywhere. ., goes .

everywhere with me. ..'

In addition to the knowledge about the human body, the teacher
was keen to develop further the children's skills in measuring,
84 Creativity in primary science

which had been the focus of the mathematics work in the previous
term, and to teach them about using tables and presenting data
in an organized way. The topic easily provided opportunities for
this as can be seen in the work described later in the chapter.
The children were not particularly excited by the topic at first
as they thought they knew all about their bodies, but it was not
long before they realized there was a lot more to learn and they
became engrossed. There were also two model skeletons that had
been put up in the classroom, one of which showed not only
the bones but many of the organs in the body. To begin with the
children gave them at most a cursory glance, and in some cases
appeared to find them distasteful, but before long they were going
to them and having very serious discussions about what all the
parts were and how many bones they had.

Hair
One of the key events in getting the children more involved and
interested was the studies and investigation on hair. There was
a sudden awakening of interest when the children realized that
they could do investigations on themselves. While not the first
activity, it was done very early in the topic.
Early descriptive work where children sought words to describe
hair was followed by an investigation of hair strength. It was an
investigation which lent itself to the use of a table for recording
the results (Figure 5.2) and hence reinforced understanding of the
use of tables. It is, in fact, an investigation which can be used for
a variety of materials (hair, threads of wool, cotton, etc.) and vari-
ants of it can be found in other books. Given the relatively low
weights needed to be hung on the bottom of hair before it snaps,
the use of paper clips is sensible and is simple to resource.
Interpretation is less easy. Children have a tendency to isolate
a single factor as significant (long, curly), e.g. 'long hair is stronger
than short hair' but several children quickly realized that more
than one factor was coming into play.
Having got the class interested, what else was done? In out-
line, one system of the body after another was studied. Each new
system was started by a discussion or other exercise which ena-
bled the teacher to find out what the class knew already. She then
tended to give them activities they could engage in together in
small groups, but as children finished activities at different times,
 Ourselves 85

W koe
kay? COtou/

T
T
S

Figure 5.2 Table of data on hair

their studies diverged. The considerable use of secondary sources

of information meant that children could easily work by them-
selves at different rates. Sometimes a child might read 'ahead'
about the next system of the body to be studied, or, as was the
case in the study of the brain, a small interest group, often led by
the more able children, would choose to explore something on
their own, but with the teacher's permission.

Monitoring overall learning

Day-to-day activities provide teachers with information about

the children's learning, and one or two of the incidents that this
teacher selected as examples of significant learning are included
in the section on learning activities later in this chapter. In this
section I have included four activities which were planned spe-
cifically to help the teacher elicit information about what the
children knew and could do. The first is a brainstorming exercise
used at the start. The second is a problem-solving exercise, which
required the children to use a range of knowledge and skills which
were being developed. The third was a drawing task done indi-
vidually by all the children both before and after teaching to see
86 Creativity in primary science

the difference. The fourth was an exercise iii interpreting data which
was done systematically with each child and required individual
interviews.

Initial brainstorming - living things

Children were asked at the start to write down their definitions
of living things and then, working in groups of four or five, to
sort pictures into two sets: living and non-living. Most of the
class had no difficulty in doing this, but there were a few chil-
dren who classified televisions and motor bikes as living because
they moved. This is not at all unusual and confirms findings
from research (Osborne and Freyberg 1985). The teacher used the
children's definitions and their grouping to draw out from a
group discussion as many things as possible that living things
do. The list covered mainly eating, breathing, growing, and
moving. These four ideas were therefore developed alongside
the work on the structure of the body. The subject of reproduc-
tion tends to be difficult at this age as children cannot relate it to
themselves, so this was not included.

Setting a problem to use and develop knowledge of

the needs of living things
The teacher wanted the children to think quite seriously about
the needs of living things to help them to understand the signific-
ance of the functions of the parts of the body. She wanted them
to understand for instance that we have mechanisms for getting
air and food into the body, because the body needs air and food.
The idea of needs, however, has to extend to the environment in
which something lives (the need for appropriate temperature,
safety, shelter, etc.) as well as focusing on the things that have to
be taken into the body. The teacher decided at this point that
children had a greater chance of understanding 'needs of living
things' in relation to an animal that had to be looked after, rather
than in relation to themselves; she therefore set the problem of
choosing a pet for the classroom. This was not a simulated prob-
lem — they really were to buy and care for the chosen pet. By
May the class had acquired two pet goldfish following careful
research into the problem. An additional reason for choosing pets
as opposed to humans was that the research which had to be done
 Ourselves 87

in order to decide what was the most appropriate pet required

research in books; whereas if they had considered their own needs
they would have drawn only on their experience. A constraint was
the budget — a little over £20 from the class fund.
The four pets suggested initially by the children were goldfish,
hamster, gerbil and parrot; there was no difficulty in recognizing
that cats and dogs were unsuitable. The class decided in discus-
sion with the teacher that they would have to find out about the
cost of buying and maintaining the animal; the size of container
it would need; the items to go inside the container; and features
that made the animal interesting. The children also realized that
there would probably not be one unique solution to the problem
so a choice would have to be made. The choice was made even-
tually by every child voting. The original inclusion of a parrot in
the list came from the story The Pet Shop in the Funny Bones series,
in which the parrot in the shop keeps shouting out 'You've got
a big bum' and the teacher is sure that they all think it would be
very funny having such things shouted out in school.
Finding appropriate information books was not easy. They had
to have pictures in them so that children who were not reading
fluently could still find and extract considerable information. The
Dorling Kindersley books on pets and the slightly old-fashioned
Ladybird books proved some of the most useful; the research-
ing in books worked well for all levels of children. The research
extended to interviewing the ladies at the local pet shop, whose
cooperation had been sought, and received, in advance by the
teacher, to find out the price of each animal and the cost of feed-
ing and bedding. It was this part of the research that revealed
that parrots would cost about £500, and led to the substitution
of a budgerigar for the parrot in the list. The trips were planned
so that small groups would be taken to the shop by the support
teacher who worked with the class on Tuesday mornings.
Figure 5.3 shows one of the four posters that were in the class-
room with the results of the research, along with two of the poems
written about buying a pet.
Once the voting had taken place (the goldfish 'won' by one
vote), the two goldfish were finally bought for the start of the sum-
mer term. Setting up the rotas for their care and maintenance
was incredibly valuable. The children were made to do this them-
selves; to make sure that everyone had a turn, but also that the
fish were not overfed. Coping with weekends made them look at
88 Creativity in primary science

Can I have a pet

please?
Can I have a pet please?
A puppy or a mouse would be nice
Or I wouldn't mind a cat
Or a bird would be nice
Can I have a pet please?
A hamster?
O.K.
Let's go down to the pet shop
And buy one
Before you change your mind

Thomas and Kaja

Figure 5.3 Display of information researched about a pet

 Ourselves 89

dates carefully, and they had to make sure that the Friday feeders
put in the pellets which will last two days.
Of the four activities selected for this section, this problem solv-
ing looks least like an assessment tool. Good assessment tools are
usually good learning activities, so it is often not possible to distin-
guish them. The purpose to which they are put and the way they
are used tend to determine their classification into one or other.
This example shows that children of this age can rise to the chal-
lenge of such a problem; they can collect and evaluate informa-
tion on a problem that interests them; they can use a variety of
sources for their information (books, pamphlets, people); they
can (with help) ask appropriate questions to elicit the information
they want; they can evaluate available resources to help them
make choices (e.g. the eventual decision to take the much loved
idea of a parrot off the list); they can come up with an answer in
which the teacher has sufficient confidence to follow it through
to the purchase of the pet.
Before moving to the third assessment tool, it is worth pausing
to review the organization of this one. First there were four groups,
each of which took on the responsibility of researching one of the
animals and displaying the information for everyone. The teacher
had a support teacher once a week. Originally all groups were to
go to the pet shop but in the event the supply teacher was ill for
some of the time and only one group went. One child from each
of the pet groups was selected to take questions for the whole
group. In every case the teacher selected a child for whom Eng-
lish was not their home language in order to boost their confid-
ence. One of the important lessons to be learnt by the children
from such an activity is that reliable information cannot be col-
lected quickly; that often two or three sources need to be consulted
because no single source has all the information needed; that it
is possible to pick up conflicting information from two different
sources, necessitating further research. Even the voting cannot be
done at one instance in time. This problem was a shared problem:
the care of the pet was to be shared, and therefore everyone had
to be involved in the voting. The absence of one or two children
through illness had to be allowed for by having a voting box in
which children could put their votes. The opening of the box was
then done only after everyone had had an opportunity to cast
his/her vote.
The teacher had wondered if the children would vote for the
90 Creativity in primary science

pet they had researched, but this did not necessarily happen; an
indication that some really were evaluating the information sens-
ibly and making an informed decision.
A minor interesting point was the naming of the fish as Rose
and Lily; two names that the teacher would have expected or
chosen herself. She realized, however, that she had recently been
talking to the class about a Victorian painting in which there were
two little girls called Rose and Lily. Children sometimes make links
the teacher does not anticipate!
In reflecting overall on how the children tackled this problem,
she commented that 'their behaviour modelled adults'; they could
pick up the problem at odd points, find out a few more points,
record them and then go on with other activities. Their interest
was maintained over several weeks.

What is inside our bodies — drawings before and after

teaching

The third assessment tool was children's drawings. These pro-

vided the teacher with an indication of what the children knew
about what was inside their bodies near the start of the topic
(January), and what they knew by the end of the topic (Febru-
ary). The task comprised merely a request to the children to draw
what was inside their bodies on to a template; it is similar to the
tasks used in the SPACE project (see Chapter 2). The drawings
shown in Figure 5.4 are typical of the sort of changes evident in
many of the pictures. The number of parts drawn had increased;
position was better understood; more labels were known; detail in
the wrist and hand were shown on many drawings; the spine was
present in several although it is difficult to tell whether spine or
breast bone had been included if they are not labelled; the skull
has specific sockets for the eye and ear. It is of course likely that
the increase in knowledge is greater than that shown, because
children are often able to tell you things which they do not put
down on paper.
Compared with the problem-solving activity this was easy to
organize. All the class can do the drawing at the same time. Indi-
vidual attention was needed for those children who had difficulty
writing the labels; the teacher asked them what the parts were called
and she then wrote in what the children told her.
 5E1?

Figure 5.4 Changes in a child's knowledge about the body

92 Creativity in primary science

Exercise in interpreting data

As mentioned earlier, one of the teacher's objectives was to help
children be able to use evidence, especially evidence related to
measurements and displayed in tables. Towards the end of the
topic the teacher devised a task which would test the children's
ability to extract and interpret information from a table. The task
was similar to those devised by Goldsworthy and Feasey (1993)
for helping children interpret data in tables and charts. In order
to be successful the children had to be able to recall the sort of
measurements that they had made of their own handspan, other-
wise they would not have known that the data given was larger
and therefore likely to belong to adults. The child's response
shown in Figure 5.5 was typical of many of the answers and
showed considerable ability on the part of the child in reading
and using tables of data. Overall, all the children (25 of them)
were able to answer the questions correctly except for:
• three children who could not recognize that the numbers re-
ferred to 'grown-ups';
• three who could not cope with such high numbers, but the
teacher suspects they could work with smaller numbers;
• two who did not know how to use the data to help them answer
the question.
Given the quite sophisticated skill needed to read rows and col-
umns on tables and understand what is related to what, this is
quite impressive for the age group.
The acquisition of an appropriate pet, the increase in knowledge
about living things, the ability to interpret data and the realiza-
tion that people can be the subject of an investigation were some of
the outcomes of this topic. What were some of the other activities
which led to these outcomes?

Learning activities

One of the interesting aspects of the collection of learning activ-

ities that this teacher devised, or selected from various sources,
is their active nature. They used a vast amount of first-hand evid-
ence, things that the children can observe and measure themselves,
even though it is not possible to 'take the lid' off the body and
 Ourselves 93

Narfle:

Span Arm
1

17 eq

e7
3ennq 20
Ma.LC01r4 20 S4..

Mne, 21

- 22
2.3

Je,

Tack. 2q.

pQcpLc oh

have

/'0

ha3 501' 21) aitd QLf. JcuJc kas 301 Ti.

$o hQ.S srnaUer hoii4S

Figure 5.5 'Data probe' to gauge children's ability to read data

 ____________________________________
___________________________________

94 Creativity in primary science

ID Card

Name

Address

D0B

am years old

My height cm

My reach cm

My handspan cm

My stride cm

My eye colour

My hair

Figure 5.6 Personal ID cards

have a look inside. Much of the information gained in this way,

about the outside of the body and about what it can do, is used
to link with the information about the inside gleaned from books
and other secondary sources.

Data collection on themselves

Making the ID cards shown in Figure 5.6 was an important part
of the topic. It did not in fact take long, as many of the measure-
ments had been made the previous term in the work on meas-
urement in mathematics, and further information needed such as
the length of the spine was added with little difficulty because of
the skills the children had. The box of ID cards was a database con-
stantly referred to by the children. They could extract information
about several children and put them on one table, they could use
them to solve problems set by the teacher and to answer questions
generated by themselves (see Figure 5.7, 'Does the person with
the longest arms have the biggest handspan?').
Sometimes problems were generated between the children in
 Ourselves 95

Figure 5.7 Does the person with the longest arms have the biggest
handspan?

claims such as 'I've got a bigger stride than you'; these were re-
solved by: 'Let's go and check on the ID cards.' Sometimes they
involved collating qualitative instead of quantitative information,
such as that needed to answer the question 'Do all black people
have curly hair?'
It is important not to underestimate the practice that is needed
96 Creativity in primary science

in learning how to use tables. The teacher reported that at one

point a group that were investigating handspan and arm reach
made a table, with columns for Name, Hand and Arm, but then
put hand and arm measurements randomly in each column. Even
with the teacher's help they could not work out that the num-
bers were in the wrong place. It raised the question for her as to
whether they should have been using a table.
Some thought needs to be given beforehand to what features
go on ID cards, because of children's growing sensitivity. Weight
was quite deliberately not put on the list.
Another feature studied, but not put on the ID cards, was colour
of skin. The children investigated the diversity of skin colour within
the classroom and experimented with mixing paint to find a colour
which matched their skin tone.
One simple exercise associated with close observation of them-
selves was the making of face jigsaws. The children were put into
pairs and they had to draw each other's faces, noting carefully
distinctive features: shapes of eye and nose, freckles, colour of
eyes, colour of hair, skin tones, etc. The drawings were made on
a three by three grid with quite large squares. This was transferred
by the children to a smaller three by three grid, so that they appre-
ciated something of the way it is possible to scale things up and
down. The smaller pictures were stuck on to card and cut up in
order to make a face jigsaw. The jigsaws were made up quite
often, and it made the children notice carefully the relation of
one feature to another on the face.

Skeleton
Children, by the age of 7, know something about skeletons, be-
cause they appear in cartoons, stories (the Funny Bones series)
and non-fiction books. In one sense they know they have a skel-
eton, but somehow do not make the connection between the
pictures and cartoons and their own bodies. Consequently 'finding
our bones' by feeling for them is a discovery — a sort of review-
ing their knowledge of skeletons through a new perspective.
A simple fact is that bones cannot bend because they are hard;
so if the body bends at any point there must be a joint between
two bones. One activity therefore involved the children drawing
round their hands putting a cross where a bend occurred, trying
to work out how many bones they had in their hands and then
 Ourselves 97

referring to the books to check out how many of the total they
had found. The sheer number of little bones that are present in
the wrist (necessary to allow the complicated movements that our
hands can make) is always a surprise to children, but of course
these cannot all be felt from the outside. The fact that several of
the drawings of the body at the end of the topic showed the many
finger and wrist bones indicated that children had registered and
remembered this (refer back, for instance, to the right-hand draw-
ing in Figure 5.4).
Hunting the bends in their bodies to find the joints helped the
children understand the significance of these for their movement.
They made models of their arms and legs (cardboard for the
bones, split pin paper clips for the joints), carefully counting the
bends to get the models as accurate as possible.
Spine, ribs and skull were also easily found by feeling, and the
length of the spine was added to the ID card. It is interesting to
note that the brain in the February drawing in Figure 5.4 is shown
outside the skull but inside the head, giving yet another example
of what could be used as the basis of a conversation between the
teacher and the child.
Hung in the classroom were three 'basic' skeletons made out
of strips of thick paper to form 3D models. One was normal size,
one half size and one twice normal size.

Heart
Many people cannot easily find their pulse, so the task set in
the sheet shown in Figure 5.8 was not that straightforward. The
children did, however, become aware of the beating of their hearts
in FE, anticipating it partly because the teacher had talked to them
about the effect of exercise on the heartbeat.
There was a lovely incident which occurred during PE. One child,
who was not a particularly fast learner, suddenly rushed over and
asked the teacher to feel his heart beating; it was going quickly
because he was exercising. He knew this and was delighted to
have noticed that what had been discussed in class applied to him.
For him, this was a discovery.
FE reinforced the work on the body. The teacher had also found
the information that 7-year-old children are able to run for ten
minutes without stopping and had read this to the class, who
were keen to try. She made the children build up to this slowly
98 Creativity in primary science

I / T

What hap to3oLu-p

fr,7

t (.1k. tiiis has happen

We

Figure 5.8 What happens to your pulse when you exercise?

 Ourselves 99

— one minute, then two minutes with children being allowed to

stop when they had had enough. Some got up to eight minutes
and were pressing her to time them for ten minutes. Their legs
felt like jelly and they could feel their hearts pounding.

Lungs — breathing
Learning about where the lungs are, how big they are and what
they look like was done mainly through the teacher talking to the
class, showing them pictures and allowing them to look up informa-
tion in books. It was in this context that the teacher related an
incident which had stuck in her mind:
I had asked one child [of average abilityl to look in informa-
tion books and find out about lungs for the class 'busy body'.
About a fortnight later when I was starting to talk about lungs
to lead up to an investigation, the child put up his hand and
described the lungs, where they are in the body, function,
etc. This was significant because this child [not usually inter-
ested in science] had been inspired. He had read informa-
tion about lungs, discussed it with his parents, etc. and had
been able to remember it all.
So 'information told by the children' must be added to the list of
how this section was taught.
The investigation referred to by the teacher was titled 'What
happens when we breathe?' It moved from qualitative observa-
tions (What happens to the chest when we breathe?) to quantit-
ative observations, involving both measurement and calculation,
and finally to thinking about how that might relate to what is
going on inside. As with the whole body, drawings were again
used to find out what children knew about the parts of the body
which help us to breathe.

Growth
Young children first think of growth only in terms of 'getting
bigger', but they cannot readily answer 'how much bigger?'. Pre-
paring the display shown in Figure 5.9 (drawing round a child
and an adult) helped give the idea of the relative sizes.
The children brought in photographs they had of themselves
when younger and built up their own personal timelines, showing
100 Creativity in primary science

Figure 5.9 Growth: comparison of child with adult

 Ourselves 101

how they had changed. Growth is much more than 'getting big-
ger' — this was a point the teacher brought out in her discussions
with the children; she even related it back to the work which had
been done on plants the previous term — as a plant grows it also
does not just 'get bigger'. An appreciation of the increased skill
and changing functions of themselves even in a fairly short life-
time is well appreciated by the child whose work is featured in
Figure 5.10.
The mother of one of the children was expecting a baby and
was having regular photographs taken from an echoscan; she
was prepared to lend these to the teacher so that the children
could see the growth. Normally the teacher found that the chil-
dren had little interest in babies, but this time they were really
interested to see the baby when it was born.

Senses

This was not a major part of the work, more like revision from
a previous topic. The teacher used a story which was a spoof on
Little Red Riding Hood and had appeared in Guardian Education
(Baird 1994). She decided she could adapt it as a drama exercise
for her class. (The original story had Grandma telling Little Red
Riding Hood all about her big ears and what they could do etc.
until eventually she had revised all her GCSE Biology for her!)
So the children acted out a similar drama with the one playing
Grandma telling Red Riding Hood about the senses, not to GCSE
level but at their own level.

Brain
This study was mainly done by one independent small group.
The teacher, however, did spend a little time talking with the
class about the brain as the part of your body which sends
messages to make the rest of the body work. To enable the class
to appreciate the complexity of messages and incidentally to do
a valuable language exercise, she got the children to give her mess-
ages (to her arm) in order to make it pick up a pencil. She only
did exactly what they told her and they realized how difficult it
was to give precise instructions! Through playing the game several
times their ability to express their ideas improved no end.
 cpvjd
•1 COL1(d
I

Figure 5.10 Thoughts about growing up

 Ourselves 103

The language-rich classroom

The displays in this classroom, even the small selection shown
in the illustrations and described in words show how rich it is in
written and visual languages.
In reviewing briefly the words used that were specific to this
topic the teacher provided the following: body, skeleton, bones,
muscles, veins, blood, organs, heart, brain, lungs, nerves, senses,
ear drum, eye socket, breathing, living, internal, joints, size, big
(long, tall, heavy), Of these, 'organs' and 'big' presented prob-
lems; because 'organs' is a term referring to a group of things all
of which look very different, and because the children could not
differentiate between long, tall and heavy in descriptions of things
as 'big'.
The display for the next topic on light (Figure 5.11) is another
example of how rich the study of science is in vocabulary.

Supporting resources
The resources used, apart from the classroom displays, were a
video about the human body which covered bones, hair and
skin. It supported the children's learning and extended it to areas
they would not be dealing with in depth in the topic (animal
skin and camouflage).
Book resources included books on the human body which were
lent by a parent: the Ladybird books on pets, which have already
been mentioned, and a large picture book on the human body.
The equipment needed was relatively simple, mainly station-
ery items and measuring equipment.

Final note

The children returned to a related topic the following year to learn

more about themselves and other living things. The Pine class
busy body went with them, and they continued to build their
knowledge on to it. Their ID cards also went and these are being
used to look at the changes in themselves over a period of time.
With continuity from one part of the school to the next often the
subject of discussion, it is nice to find such a simple example.
104 Creativity in primary science

I,

PrQn,?

Figure 5.11 Display for starting the next topic — more words
 6
The Channel tunnel
YEAR 6 (10 AND 11-YEAR-OLDS)

From overall topic to teaching plans

The school where this topic was taught is in Bexleyheath, a sub-

urb south-east of London close to the rail link running between
the Channel tunnel terminus just outside Folkestone to the Euro-
tunnel terminus at Waterloo in London. At the time, there was
debate (and demonstrations) about the route of the rail link, but
the route for the tunnel itself had been settled, the construction
of the tunnel (or tunnels, as there are three) was well under way
and the two sides had already met.
On the UK side, and for most of the stretch under the sea, the
engineers were boring through a stratum of chalk marl (a relat-
ively soft but impermeable substance) and, on the French side,
through chalk (a soft white limestone, which does absorb water,
and can crack). Information available to the public, such as in the
small exhibition in Folkestone, focused particularly on engineering
problems such as those involved in tunnelling through these types
of rocks, in how the tunnel would be lined to stop it collapsing
 Planning chart for one term's integrated topic on the Channel tunnel — spring term
English Maths Science
Research skills Continue to improve and extend basic number Metals — investigate different metals, their properties,
Discussion — present arguments logically skills characteristics, where found, how made
Compile questionnaires Measurement — length, height, depth of tunnel Test for magnetism — magnetic metals, make simple
Vocabulary — expand, enrich, develop spelling Speed of trains compasses
strategies Timetable — length of journeys The use of metal in tunnel building (construction,
Written language — creative stories, reporting, Costs — budget, shares, % machinery)
letter writing Comparison of costs — ferries/tunnel Do compasses work underground?
Reading — stories with tunnels (a challengel) Collate information from questionnaire (com- Environmental aspects of the tunnel
Poetry — express ideas and feelings in various puter database) Experiment with different rocks
verse forms Data — proposed use of tunnel, etc.
Improve estimation skills — calculator work
Drama Geography/geology CDT
Underground building How we came to be an island Why tunnels are important
Tunnelling, escaping, exploring The site of the tunnel — why there? Look at different tunnels
Planning rescues Types of rocks, suitability, problems How are tunnels made?
Surveying the sea bed What are the problems?
Map work, tunnel link, choosing a route Design a tunnel
Planning implications for the South-East Experiment with tunnelling
How man is changing the environment Design and make a TBM [tunnel boring machine] — will
it work?
History Music
Would a bridge have been better? — investigate
The history of the tunnel Music from tubes
Why and when have people wanted to cross the How instruments work
channel in the past? Make own instruments
How did they do it? Did they succeed? Art/craft
Visits
Sew a mole (tunnel mascot)
Folkestone — Eurotunnel exhibition
Carve chalk
Speakers Accurate drawing
Engineers, surveyors Model making

Figure 6.1 Planning chart for one term's integrated topic on the Channel tunnel
 The Channel tunnel 107

and to prevent water seeping into the interior, as well as on the

operation of the tunnel when completed.
The study was planned as an integrated topic incorporating all
areas of the curriculum (see planning chart in Figure 6.1) and
lasted a whole term. The only subject taught separately was math-
ematics, with some time each day devoted to it. As can be seen
from the chart, however, mathematical skills and understandings
were to be used in the topic.
The richness of opportunities for a variety of learning is appar-
ent. There are three historical time-scales; first, the very long geo-
logical time-scales of the formation of the rocks in the area and
the transition from when Britain was joined to the European land
mass to it being a set of offshore islands; second, the time-scale
of just over a hundred years from the first serious attempts to
make a land route beneath the Channel (the 1881 boring still exists
near Folkestone); and third, the time-scale of the building of the
actual tunnel. Understanding why and how the tunnel was built
as it was requires some appreciation of properties of the rocks,
such as hardness, density absorbency and permeability, along-
side an understanding of how information is gained about rocks
under the sea and about how routes are surveyed and charted.
Consideration of such things as what to do with the spoil from
the boring, and what area of land is needed for such a project
leads naturally into understanding the impact of the project on
the existing environment and to discussion of values. The need to
extract, seek out and collate information from books, pamphlets,
exhibition labels, videos and people, gives ample opportunity for
research skills, for reading, writing, listening and talking.
Anyone used to seeing teachers' planning charts will recog-
nize that this comes from an experienced teacher, who is able in
a short space to summarize the main areas of learning and indic-
ate activities which will be undertaken. It contains questions which
focus attention on the core of the subject to be studied and which
are likely to intrigue the learner. The ones shown on the chart
are:

• Why and when have people wanted to cross the channel in the
past? How did they do it? Did they succeed?
• The site of the tunnel — why there?
• Do compasses work underground?
• How are tunnels made?
108 Creativity in primary science

• What are the problems?

• Would a bridge have been better?
These are, in fact, subsets of the 'key questions' selected for the
whole topic, i.e.:
• Why is the tunnel being built?
• How and where is it being built?
• Do we really need a tunnel?
• How will a tunnel affect:
(a) the country?
(b) us personally?
Key questions are notoriously difficult for beginning teachers
to identify. They need to be those questions that get to the heart
of the matter and yet are accessible to the particular group of
learners that the teacher will be working with. The way in which
'key questions' have to relate two ways — to the subject itself and
to the learner — and the ways in which teachers build up their
repertoire of questions are discussed further in Chapter 9.
Moving from identifying the learning opportunities in a topic,
mapping the concepts, knowledge and skills to be developed and
identifying the key questions to be addressed, to planning the
order in which things are to be taught is not a simple task and
there is no single answer as to how it should be done. Certain
things, such as visits, have to be put in the diary early because
of the need to book places and transport, and to gain written
permission from parents in advance. Timing of a visit within a
teaching sequence is crucial. If it is too early in the teaching then
the children are not sufficiently briefed to be able to make use
of the outside resource, and the time, effort and money involved in
organizing the trip are wasted. If it is too late then they go when
they have few questions to ask. Many teachers would argue that
there is value in two visits: an early one to generate questions and
a later one to seek answers, and to ask more sophisticated ques-
tions. This is fine if the location is nearby and within walking
distance of the school, but not if it requires the booking of coaches
and considerable expense (note for instance the teacher in Chap-
ter 3 who took the children several times to the nearby park, but
only once to Epping Forest). The precise time for the visit may be
determined by external factors such as when there are places
available at the site, hence the teacher has to adapt sequences of
 The Channel tunnel 109

Week 1 Introduction: Looking at maps of the South-East

Jan Group brainstorm What do I know about the tunnel?

Week 2 Pangaea — how we came to be an island

Jan Discover Physical Geography Hodder and Stoughton

Week 3 Looking at rocks — different types

Jan

Week 4 Tunnelling — school to swimming pool

Jan Civil engineer talk

Week 5 How do we know what is under the sea?

Feb Rock strata and how we became an island' work linked
Does chalk absorb water?

Week 6 History of the Channel tunnel — why did it fail?

Feb - Snow week — collecting 1 m3 of snow

Week 7 HALF-TERM HOLIDAY

Week 8 Visit to Eurotunnel exhibition

Feb Preparation on European cities; plan journey from Manchester to
Paris now and see how to do it with the tunnel

Week 9 Constructing the tunnel — designing own TBM

Mar (programme on moles tunnelling — excellent concept of tunnel building)

Week 10 Organization of tunnel — the treaty — how it will be run, when it will be open
Mar

Week 11 Operation of tunnel — car and lorry shuttles and other vehicles
Mar

Week 12 Finishing off the folders

Mar Completing and testing TBM5
'What do I know about the tunnel now?'

Summer One day trip to France by ferry

term

Figure 6.2 Chronological sequence of the teaching

teaching so that the children are appropriately prepared for the

trip. In this topic on the Channel tunnel the teacher planned only
one visit to the exhibition centre and put it into week 8, just after
the half-term break, of an 11-week topic. (See Figure 6.2 for the
chronological sequence of the actual teaching.) The teacher's per-
sonal preparation for the visit involved a preliminary visit to the
exhibition at Folkestone, when she was able to find out the sort
110 Creativity in primary science

of information in the displays and the people who might be there

to answer questions. At this time she designed question sheets
for the visit, which matched her objectives and made best use of
the exhibition. Such preparation is standard practice at the school;
the teachers do not rely on material produced for schools at
outside locations without careful consideration as to its suitabil-
ity for the learning they want to achieve.

The teaching sequence in outline

Before turning to the detail of the teaching, it is worth identify-

ing general features evident in the teaching sequence (Figure 6.2).
There is a mixture of learning strategies throughout the topic: prac-
tical work alternating with research skills, discussion, writing,
watching videos and pencil and paper problem solving. There
is the familiar brainstorm at the start which allowed the teacher
to find out what the children already knew about the topic. This
is followed by a fairly informative two weeks of setting the scene,
understanding something of the geological history of the area
and the geology as it exists today. In week 4 she posed a pro-
blem to the class of planning how to tunnel from the school to
the swimming pool which was at the other side of the school
grounds. As will be seen later, this produced all the questions
tunnelling engineers have to face. This took them, in week 5, to
how these questions would look to the Channel tunnel engineers
and to consider how people know what is under the sea. At
this time also they experimented with one of the rocks (chalk)
to help them understand the problems related to the properties
of the specific rocks which were encountered by the tunnellers
on the French side.
By this point (week 6) the class were beginning to appreciate
the complexity of the task and learn some of the reasons why the
attempts in 1877—81 and in 1975 failed; hence they were also likely
to be prepared for finding from the exhibition how the problems
were being solved today. Week 7 was the half-term holiday. The
start of week 8, prior to the visit, was devoted to the effect of
the tunnel on routes people would take to and from France, and
knowing the location of several different European cities (knowl-
edge that was needed to play one of the games at the exhibition).
Much of the data collected at the exhibition became the resource
 The Channel tunnel 111

for tackling the last two weeks of the topic, when the management,
organization, legal and operational features of the Channel tunnel
project were studied in weeks 10 and 11.
The modelling of the TBM (tunnel boring machine) was also
wisely left until after the visit, where there had been a good oppor-
tunity to look at the machine and understand how it worked.
The Year 6 one-day trip to France was made in the summer
term. During this trip children surveyed people's opinions about
the use of the tunnel as opposed to the ferry and also visited the
exhibition at Sangatte on the French side, where most of the labels
were in French, and viewed the new landscape that had been
made out of the chalk spoil from the tunnel.

The teaching sequence in more detail

The topic started with a discussion of a current news item about

the Channel tunnel and about protests concerning the route of the
proposed rail link. The children split into groups of their own
choosing, and talked with each other about what they knew of the
Channel tunnel. They then wrote what they knew and the follow-
ing is typical of the type of account produced: 'The Channel tun-
nel is a tunnel that goes from England underneath the English
Channel to France. I have heard it mentioned on the news lots of
times and you can go through it by train. The French side and the
English side met in December 1990.'
The general opinion of the class was that nobody knew much
and that it would be a good idea to learn about it. The geo-
graphy of the South-East of England was not known, so consider-
able work was needed to enable the class to see how close both
the terminus, and the straight line from London to the tunnel ter-
minus, were to Bexleyheath. In her weekly notes on her teaching
the teacher reported that this lack of knowledge generally within
the class was 'a good thing', because 'we can start from the very
beginning with the whole class'. Studying maps of the area was
therefore one of the first things tackled, along with exercises on
how to use compasses to find direction (and how compasses
are made). Orienteering exercises in the school grounds proved
highly instructive; the first ones were devised by the teacher but
when the children understood them, they made up further ones
for each other.
112 Creativity in primary science

There were then two weeks when the class learnt about the
formation of continents, earth plates and the Ice Age, and hence
began to know that the map of the world has not always been as
it is now. The more local effects of the Ice Age, causing Britain to
be separated from the body of the mainland by a water channel
(although it is still connected to the plate underneath the water),
were then studied. The difference between separate plates, and
separate pieces of the same plate, is not easy to understand when
from the surface they all look like bits of land with water in be-
tween. But the difference is important when you are tunnelling;
tunnelling between places on the same plate is feasible; tunnel-
ling between plates is not!
The fact that there are different types of rock in the earth's crust
needs to be appreciated, because the route the tunnel goes may
well be determined by the particular rock formations at any point.
The study of the formation of rocks in the earth's crust which
was undertaken in week 3 set the groundwork for the study of
the specific rocks which were in the neighbourhood of possible tun-
nel routes. The teacher reported that this topic fascinated the class
and she could have done with an expert to help answer all the
questions raised, or at least to know where to find all the answers.
Between her and the class they put together a considerable collec-
tion of rocks, and recognized from preliminary observations and
simple scratch tests just how different they were.
The sheer breadth of knowledge that primary teachers have
to have is illustrated by this topic. The teacher recorded two of
the resources that were particularly useful to her for the first
two weeks' work; first was the book Discover Physical Geography
(Grimwade 1987), and second was a BBC schools programme
Environments which showed rock formation in coastal areas. This
latter is pertinent to the South-East of England as all the rocks
are sedimentary and were originally laid down under water.
Week 4 was, in the teacher's mind, one of the turning points
in the topic. The task she devised for the children was simply
to plan how to construct a tunnel from the school to the swim-
ming pool, which was in a sports complex adjoining the school
grounds. The journey was not far, but when the weather was rainy
or snowy, it was unpleasant. This task turned out to be one of
the most fruitful exercises of the topic because it made the chil-
dren understand, in a way which was very personal to them, the
issues involved in tunnel building. In an initial discussion the class
 The Channel tunnel 113

Things to think about

1 Where is it going?
2 How deep/long/wide does it need to be?
Where will it start and finish?
4 How will we build it?
5 What will it cost?
6 How long will it take?

What do we need?
A plan
Workers
Digging tools and machines
Building materials

Figure 6.3 Tunnel building — things to think about

Problems encountered
1 Will it fall in?
2 Are there any pipes or cables in the way?
3 How can we be sure we are digging in the right direction?
4 What shall we do with the spoil?
5 Where do we get the money from?
6 Who is going to dig it?
IS IT REALLY WORTH IT?

Figure 6.4 Problems to be faced in tunnel building

listed things they would have to think about in making their plans
and drew up a list of things that they would need (Figure 6.3). The
problems slowly began to emerge; a summary list put together
at the end of the drawing is shown in Figure 6.4. A teacher really
could not ask for much more; the questions are all relevant to
tunnel builders whether going half a mile or 20 miles.
One child's plans are included in Figure 6.5. The accompany-
ing explanation was one of the most detailed, where the child con-
sidered the construction and support of the tunnel, the necessary
slope at one end and trapdoor at the other, the number of carriages
needed and the means of moving the carriages through (pulled by
a rope). The rope is to be attached to a winding handle; there is,
however, no information about who will be turning the handle.
The response which I received, when I asked the teacher
how she thought of the idea of the tunnel from the school to the
pool, was typical of what other teachers say about their bright
ideas: 'I don't know, it suddenly came into my head.' There seem
to be preconditions that are often reported: a certain unease that
 Making a tunnel from the school to the swimming pool
1 Make a shed like this out of plywood and cover
it with Artex plaster and use orange tiles on the roof.
Location: lawn by football playground. Make a ramp going
eight metres downwards, (for route see the picture marked A)
2 To make a start to the tunnel use a machine called a mole
and dig a tunnel six feet high and four feet wide. Support this by
wooden beams made of oak wood. Cover with metal sheets (see pictures here).
3 Pin down rails on the surface of the floor going across the floor and down through the tunnel and fix the winding
handle at the end of the shed just above the door. Get a very long rope and hook it into the winding handle and put
hooks all the way through the tunnel on the ceiling and thread the rope through each hook. Make sure the rope is a
bit too long so that there will be room on the winding handle and fix a winding handle on the other side of the tunnel
and fix the other end of the rope onto that and thread it through, so that there will be plenty of rope on the floor.
4 Make a joinable group of little carts about 15 cm high (see picture B) seating six children in each. Make seven of
these carts. Join all the carts together and tie the ends of a rope to one of the carts at each end. When you turn a
handle the carts should move through the tunnel. When you turn it the other way, they should come back again.
5 At the swimming pool cut one of the slabs out from underneath, come through and fix it in with two hinges. Fix a
hoop on the wall and put a small rope over it. Fix one end to the slab and put the other end through the slab (see
picture C). Pull the rope from the inside and the slab lifts up.

Figure 6.5 One child's plans for the tunnel from the school to the pool
 The Channel tunnel 115

something different is needed for all sorts of reasons (in this

case because the topic was becoming too teacher-directed) and
a willingness to try something new. Also, when dealing with things
on a very different scale from pupils' normal experience, a 'bridg-
ing task' is needed which relates both to their existing experience
and the new knowledge they are to learn; this local tunnel served
the function of such a task.
About this time parents of children about to join the school were
making preliminary visits, and amongst them was a civil engineer
who was more than willing to come and talk to the class about
tunnel building. She chaired a lively discussion about the advant-
ages and disadvantages of bridges and tunnels and showed the
class how to navigate in a straight line underground (where com-
passes won't work).
She was also able to provide geological maps of the area on
both sides of the Channel, which proved useful when the children
were looking at what types of rock would need to be dug out at
the different sites. Week 5 was devoted to the specific geology of
the area and particularly to the question of how people know
what is under the sea. This was set as a problem to the class in
rather the same way as the school tunnel problem. The children
came up with a range of ideas — divers, submarines and shafts —
some very futuristic. At this point the teacher made them think
back to the work they had done on how Britain became an island
separated from the mainland to think about the likely strata under
the sea. She had as a resource not only the geology maps referred
to above but posters from various exhibitions, some specifically
written with children in mind. These show quite clearly the strata
continuing under the sea with the same rocks mirrored either side.
By now the children knew that the chalk was considered more
of a problem than the chalk marl for several reasons: it cracks
easily, it absorbs water and it is harder than chalk marl. They
devised scientific tests to appreciate the extent of the problems.
The investigations were relatively simple but were all devised
and carried out by the children themselves. These included:

• finding the difference in the weight of chalk when it is wet

from when it is dry;
• finding out how much water chalk will hold;
• measuring how much water is absorbed by chalk by pouring
water on to chalk in a jar and marking the initial water level.
116 Creativity in primary science

The water level was then checked again several hours after the
chalk had absorbed the water;
• finding out how rapidly powdered chalk settled in a mixture
of chalk and water.

These were all relevant because the means of getting the chalk
out was to grind it up, mix it with water and pump it out into
tanks where the slurry had to settle.
The historical study in week 6 provided the opportunity for the
children to appreciate that projects of this sort require carefully
worked out cooperation between the two countries (the 1877—81
tunnelling ceased because the French and English could not agree
about a completely different matter, i.e. who should govern Egypt).
They also require a lot of money (the 1975 boring had to stop
because at the time of the world oil crisis the British government
could not afford to carry on).
Week 6 was the week when snow happened to fall and the
teacher had the inspiration to take advantage of it, by asking the
class to collect it into a pile to try and make one cubic metre. In
fact the children never quite managed to collect enough, which
helped them to register just how much material there is in one
cubic metre and to begin to have some idea of the sheer volume of
spoil that was being dug out of the tunnel every day (1100 cubic
metres) and which had to be dealt with in one way or another.
Week 8 was the week of the visit to the exhibition. By this point
the children were armed with considerable information about,
and understanding of, the problems of tunnelling and hence were
likely to be able to make use of the technical explanations which
featured in the exhibition. They had done less on the effect of the
tunnel on travel times and routes, so at the start of the week the
teacher set an exercise of finding details of the current journey
from Manchester to Paris. This particular journey was selected so
that the children could compare it with the journey when the
tunnel was open, which featured in one of the displays at the
exhibition.
The journey from the school to Folkestone takes less than an
hour, so it was possible to spend three hours at the exhibition
and still fit the whole excursion into the normal hours of a school
day. The question sheets devised by the teacher covered the tech-
nical side (materials and construction of the tunnel linings, size
of the tunnel); differences in transport arrangements for cars,
 The Channel tunnel 117

lorries, caravans, coaches and bikes; the total system of tunnels

and termini; the advantage of the tunnel for train passengers; the
frequency of trains to both Paris and Brussels; operational con-
trol such as dealing with passports and buying tickets; measures
proposed to stop the spread of diseases such as rabies; the effect
of the tunnel on tourism in the region; the history of the tunnel
and military concerns about having a tunnel between England
and France; several exercises requiring collection and manipula-
tion of data about proposed number of cars, passengers, etc. and
about journey times and distances. Finally they had to go to the
top of the viewing tower from where they could see the site where
the terminus was being built and work out where everything
would go.
On return to school, thank you letters had to be written both
to the parents who had accompanied the school party and to the
Eurotunnel exhibition staff:
Dear Mrs Clark
I am writing to you to say thank you very much for helping
looking after us when we visited the Eurotunnel exhibition.
I was pleased I went because it helped me learn about the
tunnel and it will help me with my work. I liked the train set
best because it showed you where the tunnel went and how
it worked.
Yours sincerely
M

Dear Eurotunnel
Thank you for letting us visit the exhibition. I learnt a lot of
things to do with the tunnel especially the times of how to
go from Britain to France by the Eurotunnel. I also enjoyed
the game that was in the centre. I was a couple of minutes
out. I especially enjoyed the Marcus Mole quizzes above the
gift shop. Also I enjoyed the painted world where you had
to search for Marcus, in the world. I also enjoyed the film.
From
K

Week 9 was devoted to the theme of actually constructing the tun-

nel, using the information gleaned to date. The teacher commented
that 'the work done previously on chalk proved very useful as the
children had a good understanding of the problems of the French.'
118 Creativity in primary science

It included watching a nature programme on moles which gave an

excellent concept of tunnel building. The week included the start
of two practical tasks: making models of TBMs and sewing toy
moles (Marcus the Mole was a tunnel mascot, and appeared as
the 'explainer' on posters about the tunnel, especially those pre-
pared for children). The TBMs at the exhibition had generated a
lot of interest; it is not until you stand next to these machines
that you can appreciate just how large they are and how powerful
they must be. The class were keen to have a go at making work-
ing models. The models the children made incorporated a base
on wheels so that the machine could move down the tunnel as it
was bored, and various solutions to the boring tool (screwdrivers
were one solution). The boring tools were powered by electrically
driven motors and they were tested on a sandy bank in the school
grounds. Inevitably the children hit a lot of problems in making
these but learnt a lot in the process. One thing they had not
thought about until they tested their models was that you need
some means of reversing the tool to pull it, and the spoil, out.
The final two weeks were spent completing the practical tasks;
the children used the information collected at the tunnel and in
the poster display at school to discuss further the organizational
and operational features of the tunnel project, to prepare a class
poster of the tunnel and to complete their project folders.
Figure 6.6 shows some questionnaires that the children wrote.
They did in fact play an important part in the project. The chil-
dren had decided to survey people's opinions about the tunnel.
They had thought that it would not take long to write the ques-
tions, only to find that it was a very difficult task to write questions
which effectively elicited the information they wanted. The teacher
had a lot of discussion with the class first about what it was they
wanted to know and then about what question would be suitable.
The questionnaire was given to people in the area, people travel-
ling on the ferry to France and to relatives of the children who
lived in other parts of the country. The difference in answers
from people who did not live in the South-East was noticeable;
they automatically thought the Channel tunnel was a good idea
and would be happy to travel in it.
This difference in perspective when things are on your doorstep
was noticeable in another way. The teacher found that the children
were very anxious about the threat of rabies spreading, via foxes
and other animals being able to walk through the tunnel. This fear
was heightened by the presence of foxes in the school grounds.
 The Channel tunnel 119

Questionnaire about Eurotunnel

1 Do you think the tunnel is worth building?
2 Why?
3 Do you know that your car goes on a special train which goes through the tunnel?
4 Would you use it?
5 Why?
6 Do you think that trains should go through?
7 Why?
8 Would you use the passenger train or not?
9 Why?
10 Have you been to the Eurotunnel exhibition?
11 Do you want the tunnel?
12 Why?

Channel tunnel questionnaire

1Will you use the Channel tunnel?
Yes? No?
It not, why?
2 Do you think that the tunnel leaves from
Dover?
London?
Folkestone?
3 How much do you think it will cost to go through the tunnel?
4 Do you think the tunnel will be a good idea?
5 What advantages will you have?
Do you think the Channel tunnel should have trains or cars?
Cars Trains
7 Do you think it will be sate in the tunnel?
8 How tall do you think the tunnel will be?
9 Do you think the tunnel will be faster than other transport?
Yes No
It yes, why?
10 How long do you think it will take to go through the tunnel?
10 mm? 35 mm? 1 hour?
11 Do you think the shuttle trains go every
15 mm? 7.5 mm? 30 mm?

Figure 6.6 Questionnaires written by children

The intensity of questioning and seeking out of information about

the preventive measures was impressive. Eventually the children
were satisfied with the proposed precautions and even explained
these carefully to others who shared their original anxiety

Summary
My narrative in this chapter has foliowed a chronological sequence.
I am, however, still aware of the jigsaw metaphor I used in Chap-
ter 3 to describe my finding out about other people's teaching:
fitting the bits together piece by piece until they all make sense
120 Creativity in primary science

and link together. In this chapter the metaphor fits also the chil-
dren's learning: they found a whole range of information relevant
to the topic and slowly pieced it together to make sense of the
news items periodically heard on radio or television. The children's
folders slowly accumulated a wealth of information and ideas:
the factual reports of the Channel tunnel construction; drawings
to explain the construction; their own plans for tunnelling from
the school to the swimming pool; letters; accounts of the geolo-
gical history of the area; ideas about how one might survey what
was under the sea and accounts of how it was actually done;
mathematical exercises on journey times; mapping exercises on
routes; designs and reports of the experimental work with chalk;
drawings to show the landscaping plans at the French and English
ends of the tunnel; descriptions of the environmental concerns
and solutions; and poems about being in a tunnel. The reader
will have to imagine the wealth of material which was in these
folders from the few brief extracts reproduced here and from the
descriptions of the activities in which the children were engaged.
Right at the end of the term the teacher asked the class to write
what they now knew about the topic and these accounts were also
in their folders.
There was also a wealth of poster resources accumulated which
had become, in the absence of books about the tunnel, the main
source of up-to-date information for the children's research.
For the teacher, perhaps the clearest feedback showing just how
much had been learnt came during the trip to France the follow-
ing term. This was very much a family trip with as many parents
as possible joining the group. When they visited the exhibition
the children could explain precisely what all the exhibits were
about, without having to read the labels (many of which were in
French). They were pleased with how much they knew and how
much they could explain to their parents (who were, of course,
impressed). They also visited the area of Sangatte, which was
originally a flat area, but which had been reshaped with the chalk
which had been dug out of the tunnel in water, and then used to
form hills. It made an interesting contrast to earlier studies they
had made about routes through Kent when they had learnt how
routes had had to follow the geography of an area. Now people
no longer needed to 'follow, a landscape' because they could alter
it quite dramatically. Again the children were able to explain the
whole process to their parents.
 The Channel tunnel 121

Children's accounts of what they had learnt

The accounts of what the children had learnt, written at the end of
term, were at least three times the length of those written at the
start in January and some were much longer. They contained a
lot of detail, as in the following two accounts:
When the French started to build their tunnel they found out
that they would have to go through chalk and that chalk
absorbs water so at their end of the tunnel they put rubber
linings so that the water would not go into the tunnel. . the
.

soil they got out at the English end they poured down a cliff
and made a nature reserve with it. At the French end they
had chalk so they mixed it with water and then made hills.
The workmen use tunnel boring machines to build the tun-
nel and they follow a laser beam to make sure they're going
in the right direction. . . England and France used to be joined
under the sea, so now we will be joined again. . To start off
.

with the people have to dig a shaft. . The French have spe-
.

cial TBMs because they have to go through chalk and chalk

can crack and the water would come through.
Finally reproduced below is the full account from one child who
wrote not only about the things that had been learnt but about
his awareness of how much he had learnt:
The Channel tunnel
You should have seen me on the first day of term only know-
ing a few things about the tunnel, but things have changed!!
I know all about Pangaea the supercontinent which was the
world millions of years ago and I know about the Ice Age,
when the world sank and when the Channel was formed and
England was four-fifths covered with ice! I understand about
the environment and I think planting oak and ash woodland
is a good idea and the land will be landscaped. They are also
offering double glazing to people who live nearby to reduce
noise. I know all about the treaty and I'll mention a little
about it. Well, the treaty was signed by Margaret Thatcher
and President Mitterand on the 29/7/87. The tunnel will be
operated by Eurotunnel for 55 years. I know about igneous
rocks and sedimentary rocks. Igneous rocks are formed when
hot molten rock cools down, sedimentary rocks are usually
122 Creativity in primary science

found in the oceans and are formed by bits of rock, and dead
plants or animals, I know such a lot that I'm going to need
another page!! I know about the history of the tunnel as well.
Albert Mathieu had an idea about a tunnel. His idea was a
horse-drawn transport throughout the tunnel. His idea also
included a tall chimney that raised above the sea so fresh
air could come in. Another person interested in tunnels was
Thome de Gamond. He said that he would have to make
geological surveys before you could build a tunnel and it
will take ages to write it so look through my topic folder for
more information. So, happy reading!
 7
The river Thames
YEAR 4 (8 AND 9-YEAR-OLDS)

Introduction

The topic of the river Thames described in this chapter, like the
previous one on the Channel tunnel, came from the Aquatech
Project, in which attempts were made to explore the potential of
links between industry and schools in a modest way. The indus-
tries concerned had some connection with water technology, and
hence schools participating took a theme related to water as the
basis of these studies. In order to collect information, teachers were
asked to keep a log file of the teaching, in which they recorded
plans, successes, frustrations, resources used, and things learnt.
In addition a selection of the classroom products were displayed
in an exhibition also showing the outcome of the project. Both
the files and the exhibition panels afforded valuable information
about teaching; they became the initial source of data for the pre-
paration of Chapters 6 and 7 of this book. They were of course
supplemented by discussions with the teachers and by the teachers
commenting on the first drafts.
124 Creativity in primary science

The nature of the Aquatech Project was such that participat-

ing schools attempted to set their teaching in the context of a
specific real-life project. The teacher in this chapter's case study
chose the topic of the river Thames, as it forms an important
geographical feature in the neighbourhood of the school (the
Abbey Wood Estate in the London Borough of Greenwich), and
many children knew little about it other than its name. Within
this specific topic, however, the teacher selected two main themes
that had applicability to water in general. These themes were the
movement of water, particularly in channels, and movement in
water. The first concerned questions of flow, water currents and
the way material is carried in water; the second included the
study of means of propulsion of both fish and boats through
water. Because the topic investigated a specific river, the class
studied the river's geography (where it started, where it ended,
its meandering shape, the changing depth at different places and
locations of sandbanks and shallow areas) through maps.
The class of 8 and 9-year-olds was a multi-ethnic group, with
several children for whom English was a second language. There
were 26 children in the class, 14 girls and 12 boys. This was the
second year that they had been taught by this teacher; she had
already instilled in them considerable independence of action and
thought, and they were used to the way that she organized the
teaching and learning. She reports that had this not been the case
(and had she not had several years experience) she would not
have tried having a river of water in the classroom, made by an
electric water pump circulating water from a bucket to the start
of a plastic gutter pipe — as well as another water trough where
floating and sinking experiments were under way, a paddling
pool for testing boats, and a role play area in the form of a large
yacht in the corner of the room. She also recognized that taking in
fish from the fishmonger for close observational drawing, coping
with the inevitable fishy smell about the place, and the need to
keep the fish overnight in the refrigerator so that the work could
be completed over two days, did require considerable goodwill
on the part of her colleagues.

Planning ideas and resources

The overall map of the topic, produced during a planning week-
end when several teachers met to consider possibilities, is given
 The river Thames 125

in Figure 7.1. This plan has strong elements of science, techno-

logy and language, with some history and geography; the sub-
sequent work did integrate these elements with considerable
success. There was no intention of making the topic cover all areas
of the curriculum; mathematics was done separately, for instance.
Art and drama became more integrated in the work than is appar-
ent. The main ideas to be developed were clearly identified at
this stage.
The advantage of such a plan is that it is possible to see straight
away the resources that need to be collected: navigation and Ord-
nance Survey maps of the area; books about rivers, including
those which refer to changing landscapes, the management of
rivers in general and the history of the river Thames in particu-
lar; books about boats which focus on key features of design in
relation to function; books about creatures which live in rivers
with information about how their structure helps them to live in,
and move through, water; stories about travel in boats (real and
imaginary); fish and other water creatures (does the teacher get
alive or dead creatures, or in this case, both?); possible places to
visit (a fishing trip and Greenwich Maritime Museum were listed
as possibilities); a water trough for trying sinking and floating;
equipment for making the class river, including materials for mak-
ing dams; technology tools for making boats; consumable mater-
ials for the models; a paddling pool for testing boats; a mop and
bucket, and plenty of newspaper to put on the floor to absorb
water spills.

More detailed plans

Figure 7.2 shows her next planning chart. The layout and detail
of the original has been retained, but it has been typeset rather
than left in her handwriting, because of the need to reduce it for
publication. It is worth pausing here to identify features revealed
in this second plan.
Observational drawing and writing has been selected as the
starting activity, with the teacher being quite clear about the ideas
she would be developing. She planned a discussion of differences
and similarities (a point she emphasized in discussion with me)
between humans, fish and shellfish. Within that section, the first
of the key questions appears: 'What defines a fish?'
 what lives in rivers? shape:
historical rafts
fishing E— fish
water creatures movement through development houseboat
________
water shape/function containers
Boats paddle boats
waterproofing
sailing boats

imaginary islands < Water maps er Thames > where does it

Maritime Museum staWgo
model London as a poft
London s bridges
Water flow
river beds
erosion 'landscapes' river banks through narrow Thames Barrier pollution
built up round bends, over bumps The Big Stink

'TI
Dams
/
measuring speed of water how to stop water flowing
water currents changing sand, Lego, plastic locks
flooding Medway
water flow
drainage

'I,
reclaimed land
(Abbey Wood)

Brainstorm of work around a topic

on rivers
Aquatech weekend

Figure 7.1 Plan from initial brainstorm

 The river Thames 127

Topic The river Thames — water/rivers

Fish observational drawing/writing streamline

1 Discussion of the differences between humans/fish/shellfish information work

and the similarities to back up observations
J

What defines a fish? [ use Eyewitness book,

(together pick out main
2 fish breathing words to use in
fish moving — linked with observation of goldfish ) reconstruction
fish scale

Which fish live in the Thames? children to write to Thames

'U,
What else lives in the Thames? Water Authority
Where does the Thames
11' become salty?

Movement through water Movement of water

Investigate: - river beds/bends The Thames

streamlined shapes slopes Where is it?
texture/smoothness Where does it start?
shape use mapwork
submarines measure of flow of water >
down channels
> flowmeter Where does it go
food colouring through?
sail boats* — wind powered rice
shapes build landscapes' bridges — through London
If of river —
paddle boats — elastic band measure flow ping pong balls buildings
powered then where?
Barriers/dams
cargo boats— affecting sandbags How to stop water also look at old
weight in strength river banks maps — evidence,
water clay, Lego Thames Barrier painting

rafts factors in sinking/floating London Docks

link to history study of ships in

the Thames — Greenwich
Clipper Pollution in water U
How it affects things — chemicals/oil What about Abbey
filtering etc. Wood?
Floating/sinking rubbish/decay
comparing containers The Big Stink'
and cargo' they can take

* role play area —

a small yacht
with sails etc.
Trip to London along the
Thames and Thames Barrier

Figure 7.2 A more detailed plan of the topic

128 Creativity in primary science

The teacher gave me three reasons for starting with the obser-
vational drawing. The first is that it starts from an object, rather
than something more abstract. The second is that all the class
can be working together and have a common experience, which
can then be used as a basis of discussion with the whole class.
(She knows that later, as the topic develops, children's activities
diverge.) The third is that close observational drawing provides
information about the object directly from the object with the
teacher giving little input. However, to take the learning further,
and to enable children to move from specific experiences to gen-
eralizations or unobservables, the teacher used a range of useful
questions: 'Mine has spots' 'Do they all have spots?' 'Mine has
clusters of round things' 'Could they be eggs?' (A useful follow-
up text to this conversation was Charles Reasoner's book Who's
Hatching?, 1995).
The teacher was clear at the planning stage about ideas that
she would bring out in the discussions of the drawings: 'breath-
ing', 'moving' and 'scales' were all marked on the plan. She was
also clear that she would make sure that some questions would
link observation to explanation, such as those about what the
parts of the fish enable it to do. This would lead to the study of
books and study of an actual fish (a goldfish) to find answers
(both of which activities are incorporated in the plan). The plan
also shows several activities which require the children to use the
information they are learning in a new way so that they show
that they understand it (see for instance on the top right-hand
corner of the plan, 'information work to back up observations',
'together [as a class] pick out the main words', 'to use in recon-
structing writing').
The links through to the later part of the topic were indicated by
the arrows. Questions about what fish live in the Thames, what
else lives in the Thames and where the Thames becomes salty
lead through to the study of the Thames. Note again a language
exercise which is built in, namely the writing of a letter to the
Thames Water Authority for information. The concepts of stream-
lining, driving mechanisms (moveable tails) and balance mechan-
isms (fins) are linked to the work on the movement of boats through
water, the two-way arrows indicating the expectation that the later
work will inform the earlier work and vice versa. The means of
learning has been written across the corner, i.e. 'construct and
find out'.
 The river Thames 129

Timetable of activities in the topic

Week Fish Sink! River River Paddle Role Map Sail

/prawn float (1) (2) boats play work boats

8 fLIDAY

I F'
EASTER HOLIDAY
End of
April!
early
May

Figure 7.3 Time sequence of topic

I will leave the reader to track through the rest of the chart to
find further key questions, linking threads, and ideas for experi-
ences, along with new features which were not hinted at in the first
planning sheet (Figure 7.1) but which appear in the second one.
Figure 7.3 gives the time sequence of the teaching, indicating
the main blocks of time when the different sections of the topic
were tackled. The starting date for each indicates the point at which
a new resource and set of activities were put into the classroom
and introduced to the class as a whole. Week 9 required a major
reorganization of the classroom to accommodate the tank and the
river, and half-term provided a useful point for the transition.
Thinking carefully about the spatial organization of the class at
different points is crucial.
Having the time sequence drawn out in this way showed one
other important feature I might otherwise have missed, namely
the increase in the diversity of science activities occurring as the
topic progressed (obviously there were other non-science activities
going on). To start with there was only one science activity, then
this increased to two; after half-term there were four and finally
six, reducing after the Easter break to two as the topic came to a
natural end and new studies were started.
130 Creativity in primary science

Figure 7.4 Children's drawing and painting of a mackerel

Classroom products

The remaining ifiustrations in this chapter feature some of the prod-

ucts which were displayed at the Aquatech exhibition. Like the
products in 'Rabbit's House' (Chapter 4), they provoked me to
enquire into the role the teacher played in helping children to
produce them. The summary notes which the teacher kept in the
Aquatech file at the end of each block of work, and my subse-
quent conversations with her, provided the answers. The narra-
tive of the chapter therefore follows from my questioning.

Drawing, painting and writing about the fish

Figure 7.4 shows one child's drawing and another child's paint-
ing of a mackerel, while Figure 7.5 shows a third child's writing
about the structure of a mackerel and a fourth child's writing
about the links between structure and function. Unfortunately the
paintings are not in colour, but the originals show the detailed
 The river Thames 131

Figure 7.5 Children's writing about structure of mackerel and

movement of fish in a classroom tank
132 Creativity in primary science

observation of colours of the fish accurately and skiifuiiy recorded

by careful use of watercolour.
Three of the pieces of work need to be seen as different chil-
dren's responses to encouragement to record in whatever way
they liked. In the drawing the child recorded successfully features,
shapes and textures. (The original drawing was life sized, which
made it easier to get one part in proportion to another.) Painting
allowed the child to record the range of colours that there are in
a fish which at first sight looks just grey. The descriptive writing,
accompanied by a painting, brings in the use of precise language
to point out important features and of measurement to indicate
size. Note the illuminated letter T that starts the writing; this was
part of children learning to raise the profile of their work, saying
effectively: 'Look at this — this is interesting — come and read it!'
These first three products all record observations. The fourth
piece of writing includes things that cannot be seen (oxygen dis-
solved in the water, and the fact that the fish is able to get the oxy-
gen out of the water, with the opening of the mouth and flaps at
the side of the head playing a part in the process); names of parts
(gills, pectoral fins); along with things that have been observed by
watching the goldfish and confirmed by looking in books (tail and
pectoral fins used to move, front fins used to stay in one place).
What we are seeing here is the product of the use of information
books to back up observations, with the teacher picking out key
words, talking with the class about their meaning and the children
using these new words in their writing (cf. Figure 7.2 detailed
planning chart). Before the writing was undertaken there was con-
siderable discussion about the audience for whom they were writ-
ing and the purpose of the writing.
The drawings, paintings and writing about the dead prawns
(Figure 7.6) show similar features, there were no live prawns to
watch swimming. These drawings were much larger than life
size. Again the colouring in the painting showed a lot of atten-
tion had been paid to mixing the correct colours to match the
various shades of pink. The prawn paintings were used as the
basis of batik work; lengths of dark cloth with pink prawns on
were produced, some of it being sewn into padded embroidery
The move from observation drawing to stylized artwork has an
important purpose because children have to focus on the import-
ant detail which has to be retained in the transformation.
 The river Thames 133

Figure 7.6 Children's drawing and painting of a prawn

After the children's first 'response to the fish', the teacher wrote:
'There are some fantastic drawings and paintings that can be
developed into batik. Written descriptions are less interesting
than conversation.. I need to develop observations through to
.

information and explain some specific vocabulary.' In the first

week she had encouraged the children to think about why things
were as they were (i.e. the function of scales, of the tail, of the gills,
of the mouth opening), but they had fuller discussions, followed
by searches for information and observation of the goldfish in the
second week, and their writing began to be richer in detail and
vocabulary. The examples of writing that are included in both
Figures 7.5 and 7.7 came from the second week of the teaching.
In the discussions with the class, the teacher wanted to help
reinforce the idea that fish were just another living thing like
human beings, but at the same time had their own particular
characteristics. She therefore talked about both similarities and
differences between humans and fish. In her questioning about
134 Creativity in primary science

Th2

l'ne colour ' O(\

Pr-own haue
thQir is
cvrr1
cor 0-
bIoL&
eP

are (hi?.
curia1 uPc:
o.

+IA(1. Thay iiS;4Q.

Figure 7.7 Children's writing about the structure of a prawn

the similarities between humans and fish, the children found it

very difficult to find anything similar, because they saw them-
selves as so very different from fish. When she pointed out that
both humans and fish had two eyes and that both of them moved,
the children thought that she was tricking them in some way,
thinking 'She can't really be serious, we're nothing like a fish!'
 The river Thames 135

Some things which seem obvious can take a long time and a lot
of experience for children to change in their thinking. It is also
important to help children think about relevant similarities (nei-
ther fish nor humans live on Mars but that is not very relevant).
When the teacher was talking about the fish 'breathing' by
taking in water, this presented even more of a puzzle than the
similarities discussion, because the process is so different from
breathing in humans, especially because if humans take in water
the one thing they cannot do is breathe.
The questions 'What defines a fish?' or 'If something is a fish,
what do you expect it to have, or do?' were at first challenging,
but slowly the children analysed and put into words the charac-
teristics of a fish. Their initial difficulties illustrate the problem
that everyone has of explaining a self-evident fact (children by
the age of 8 believe they know whether something is a fish or not,
without having to explain it, unless of course if someone asks them
if a shark is a fish!).
The improvement in the writing came not only from further
discussions, but by the teacher using a simple technique of chil-
dren reading their writing out to other children. 'There was huge
value in the class reading back their writing to the whole class';
she explained that they seemed to hear their own mistakes, recog-
nize that they had left things out and then go and improve it by
themselves. The activity did not always involve the whole class;
it could be done by small groups 'conferencing'.
Use of information books was not as simple as it sounds, because
she found that most of them were 'completely inappropriate for
the age group'; they were either patronizing and simplistic or too
technical. The Eye-Witness series had excellent photographs but
difficult text that required mediation by the teacher. She used this
to model how to cope with such a text, by identifying the diffi-
cult words and discussing their meaning, or looking them up in
a dictionary.
A letter was written to the Thames Water Authority at about
this point in the topic to find out about fish in the Thames. What
needed to go into the letter was discussed with the whole class,
but only two children put letters together and only one was sent
(for the obvious reason that the Authority would hardly appre-
ciate having letters from every child in the class!).
It is often later that a teacher gets evidence of what has been
learnt and assimilated. This teacher became aware that the children
136 Creativity in primary science

had understood about the action of the tail of the fish in pro-
pelling it forward and the significance of the streamlined shape
from an incident which occurred two or three months later in the
summer term. 'When the class were studying tadpoles, they quickly
focused their attention, without prompting, on how the tadpole
swam, how it moved its tail and on its streamlined shape. Other
features were not so quickly noticed.' It is also a useful reminder
of the importance of previous experience in aiding observation.

Floating and sinking

On the planning sheet (Figure 7.2) floating and sinking appear
in the bottom left-hand corner. This work was set up at the start
of the second week, while the work on fish was still under way.
Equipment comprised a table with a water trough and a range of
practical activities related to boat shapes.
The activities included making objects (such as corks and con-
tainers) float at different levels in the water to become aware that
there is not a sharp cut-off point between sinking and floating;
making boats out of pieces of aluminium foil, of the same size
and shape, to find shapes that will float without overbalancing
one way or another; loading these boats until they sank in order
to find the shapes that carried the most; testing other containers
to find out the shapes which would carry the most before sink-
ing. Some very different shape aluminium boats were made with
surprisingly (to the children at least) different capacities, which
forced discussion about what variables were particularly signifi-
cant for having a high carrying capacity.
This was one of the activities that the teacher would have liked
to follow up more systematically. The children were testing with
non-standard units and hence it was difficult to compare one boat
with another with any reliability. She considered, nevertheless,
that the children did have a better understanding of sinking and
floating than previously; they appreciated that the statement 'heavy
things sink and light things float' was not sufficient. They knew
there were other factors which came into play, particularly the
shape of the vessel. They knew that it was possible to alter the
level at which things floated and that by extending the shape in
some way it is possible to increase the carrying capacity. She
judged that only about four or five children would have any idea
of density, even at the intuitive level.
 The river Thames 137

Map studies
The map studies started after half-term with children trying to
use maps to answer the following questions:
Use the different maps and atlases to find the river Thames.
Follow its course and see where it goes.
Can you see where it started?
Can you see where it ends?
Where does it go? What places does it pass?
What bridges and tunnels can you see? (Look around London)
As the ability to read maps and take information from them
increased, then the maps became more sophisticated. They were
a major prop in the role play area as they were consulted on the
various 'journeys' taken in the classroom yacht. Navigation maps
showing the sandbanks in the Thames estuary were particularly
popular, and children came to realize the importance of under-
standing the detail on these if you are trying to navigate a safe
passage up or down the Thames from or into open sea.

Classroom river (model 1)

Figure 7.8 shows the 'river' in the classroom. The work started
with another set of questions which helped focus the children's
initial observations and trials. As time went on, however, children
tried many more activities. The starting questions were:
What happens to the 'river' if the slope is steep or very
gentle?
What happens if the 'river' is wider? or narrower? or bendier?
What does the water do if there is something in the way?
What happens if it is completely blocked?
How fast is the 'river' going? Where is it fastest?
Can you split the 'river' into two or three?
The initial exploration of water flow then focused on flow down
different slopes, in different guttering and round obstacles. The
children worked in threes and were left to investigate together
with only occasional intervention from the teacher (she used ques-
tions such as 'what about. . ?' and 'what do you think would hap-
.

pen if. . ?'). The findings were drawn together in class discussion
.

with group feedback in order to suggest further investigations.

138 Creativity in primary science

Figure 7.8 'River' in the classroom

In their observations the children were fascinated by altering

water flow, observing cross-currents, constructing waterfalls and
jumps, and they found things around the classroom to act as
obstacles.
In order to explore how fast the water travelled they used
small floating objects and stop clocks to test and investigate. There
was some frustration here, because the river was not on a large
enough scale to produce results of any kind. (Floating objects
had got to the bottom before the children were able to time them.)
Discussion of the difficulties, however, led to suggestions of alter-
native worthwhile investigations that could be done; this took the
children into what is marked on Figure 7.3 as 'River model 2'.
 The river Thames 139

Classroom river (model 2)

The children had suggested making the river look more like a
river by giving it bumps on the river bed and bends on the side.
These were constructed out of Plasticine and clay. The clay proved
much more effective than the Plasticine, which tended to slip and
was more resistant to work into the shape needed. There was
fruitful discussion and observations of water flow over bumps
and round bends. The children observed the wearing away of the
clay and slowing down of the water at various places. They used
food colouring in the water to help them see the water and the
flow rather better. Their detailed observations were then written
up to accompany drawings. Having done their own writing, the
children then discussed as a group important things to select to
summarize their findings. Like other language exercises enabling
children to review their learning, the teacher reported this to be
immensely valuable to them.

Paddle boats
The making of the paddle boats was a highly disciplined activity
The paddle boats were made eventually from corroflute (rigid
enough to withstand the forces of the wound-up rubber band, suf-
ficiently non-resistant for young children to be able to cut it safely,
waterproof so that it can be put in water, of sufficiently low dens-
ity that it will float), although other materials were offered — one
child did try cardboard first.
To get this activity started, the teacher showed the children the
mechanism of the paddle and a simple shape. She discussed with
them what they could do differently. They came up with the pos-
sibility of having the paddle in a different place, using different
material and altering the shape of the boat.
The making of the boats occurred over a period of four weeks.
The making, as could be seen by the children's drawings and
written accounts, involved several stages: the drawing of the plans
(based on a design given by the teacher) on squared paper; trans-
ference of the plan to the corroflute, by means of pricking a pin
through the paper; cutting of corroflute with a Stanley knife to
make the main body of the boat, and then cutting out the paddle;
attachment of the paddle by means of a rubber band. Finally the
boats were tested and accounts written of the whole process. It
140 Creativity in primary science

Me and Phillip tested our boats to see

how far they would go.
First we turned the paddle 10 times
to wind up the elastic band.
Phillips went the furthest.
Then we turned it 20 times and we
measured how far we got it and
then we turned it 30 times.
I think Phillips went further because
his paddle was better.

turns Phillips mine

10 50 41

20 85 75
30 99 99

Figure 7.9 Paddle boats comparisons — a fair test

is interesting to note the different foci of the writing: how boats

were made; what had to be done to make them work (winding
up the rubber band); which way the boats went; how the paddle
made the boat go; and in one case, how a problem was solved.
The writing not only focused on the making, however; the highly
structured input on how to make the boat meant that the focus
could be science rather than just technology A successful boat
was essential if the children were going to devote some of their
thoughts to how it worked. For a fuller account of four children's
drawing and writing about this task, see Frost et al. (1993).
Figure 7.9 shows one of the investigations where two chil-
dren compared the performance of their boats and began to
consider what variables might account for the differences. In this
case, and in others in this chapter, it is evident that considerable
 The river Thames 141

to make a boat. I made it with an old spa water bothe. I thought that it
I -
made it with wood it might not float because some wood doesn't float well. I first
looked at a water book and saw a bottle boat. The one I made was nothing like the
boats in the book but it gave me ideas. I got the bottle and sawed a hole in the top for
the engine. It was moving around so I got a vice which is a holder you can put wood
in to hold it still. I had a problem cutting out a hole for the motor because the tools
were too big, so I got a small hand saw and cut out a hole of the correct size. The
wiring was a piece of cake! But it didn't work. So I changed around the wires and it
worked. Next I put the battery higher up on a piece of plastic and the propellor
worked but quite slowly. Then I asked Miss Klass if I could test the boat on the pond.
It went backwards! I thought it was the propellor which was the wrong way round but
it wasn't. So I changed the wires round.

Figure 7.10 Electrically driven boat from a Year 6 class

learning in science often emerges from 'construct and make' activ-

ities because of the direct involvement of the child with the material
world.
The account of a boat made by a child in the Year 6 class in the
same school (Figure 7.10) has been included for comparison with
the work of the younger children. The writing shows the ability
of the older child to share not only the doing with the reader,
but the thinking as well. It is also clear that the older children
had a far wider choice of materials and designs at their disposal,
a choice that the Year 4 children could not have coped with. The
constraints put on the task for the Year 4 children by the teacher
seem eminently appropriate, and yet she left those small areas of
choice, which are so important for children to take over some of
the thinking.
142 Creativity in primary science

Information work on boats

The children used what books they had in the classroom to find
information about different types of boats, why boats needed to
be different shapes and also to develop the beginning of a sense
of chronology as far as boat making was concerned. The organiza-
tion of this activity was important. Whereas for most activities
the children had chosen who to work with (or worked on their
own), for this they were divided into five groups and each group
was given a different boat to research. The groups were then
regrouped so that one child from each of the original groups was
in each of the new groups. Each member now had to share their
information with their new group members, so that everyone
learnt about all the types of boats (an organization referred to
as 'jigsawing'). These presentations provided the motivation for
the children to make sure they understood what they had found
in books, so that they could explain it to their colleagues and
answer their questions.

Role play
The role play area became an important feature of the children's
learning. Role play corners are a common feature of infant class-
rooms but less common in the junior classes. It was established ini-
tially in several drama sessions where children role played being
in a small yacht in different conditions. They had to sail away
from the mainland and act out some of the adventures that they
had at sea in which they had deep water, rough water, islands,
shipwrecks and pirate attacks to cope with. They also wrote post-
cards to people from the ship to give accounts of their voyages
and adventures. Thereafter children were allowed to use the role
play area during the day as they wished, to develop their own
stories. The teacher found that the children became completely
involved; and as they learnt more and more about boats, rivers,
and water flow, so she found their new knowledge and vocabul-
ary was built into their play. Somehow the role play experience
allowed them to browse through their new vocabulary. The boat
slowly acquired life jackets, a fishing rod for catching food, maps
(especially the navigation maps), and snorkel and flippers for fish-
ing just below the surface. It had a mast, with sails which could
be hoisted, and a rudder.
 The river Thames 143

The collection of ongoing weather records, largely thought of

as part of their mathematics work, contributed to the data and
vocabulary that they could use in the boat.

Sail boats
The sail boats were a second 'construct and find out' activity,
similar to the paddle boats, with the teacher hoping that children
would be able to compare the performance of boats with differ-
ent sails. The design was drawn initially on squared paper and,
as before, was transferred to the actual construction. In terms of
construction and design, a lot of new skills were taught or old
ones consolidated, using different materials and tools (saws, drills,
knives, etc.). The children were increasingly aware of the import-
ance of careful measurement, and were more independent in
their organization.
There were some frustrations in the organization of the testing
of the boats. The battery-powered fans were completely unreliable.
In the end a hairdryer was used to create a wind, but children
found it difficult to compare results and get any satisfactory data.
In any case the teacher found the children keener to construct a
boat than to plan for differences and comparison.

The teacher as role model — reviewing learning

The teacher believes very strongly in the value of reviewing learn-

ing and modelling discussion to aid learning. She therefore made
the children take stock at least twice a week with the whole class.
She used questions like 'What have we learnt?' 'Did everyone find
that?' 'Did it always happen?' 'Why did that happen?' 'Why do
you think that is like that?' (what she calls 'hunting the "because").
She encouraged children to do the same, for example in the shared
writing from the work on the classroom river.

Organization of the activities

To some extent features of the organization have already emerged

in the account. Groupings for most activities were fairly fluid, with
144 Creativity in primary science

children choosing with whom they worked. The teacher kept con-
trol of what the children did by each day indicating on a diagram
on the board what activity each child would start on, where they
would go next and then the point at which they could have some
choice over what they did. The diagram was in the form of a
double wheel. The inner wheel had on it the core activities; the
children had to move round it and complete everything before
they moved to the outer wheel. The outer wheel had extra activ-
ities and promoted considerable independence. Children's names
were put against different activities to indicate where they should
start for the day, and they knew that this determined a large part
of their daily activities.
Most of the decisions about who should be doing what were
determined by the ongoing assessments she was making and the
need to ensure that children tackled all areas of learning; some
decisions were also determined by the resource constraints, for
instance she could only have a small group working at the river
at any one time, or making and testing boats.
Despite this organization to allow children to work at their
own pace, and hence often to work on their own, she neverthe-
less brought the whole class together on several occasions during
the week for the review of learning, for tackling new work, for
administration and for story reading.

Teacher's overall evaluation

I have built the teacher's evaluations of each section into the early
part of the chapter, but reproduce here her reflections on the whole
topic in which she raises issues which have been identified by
other teachers in the other chapters.
It was a successful topic but raised several questions/issues
for me:
1 Often what the children learn/benefit most from is not
reflected in the volume of written work, or detail. Much of
the value of working with the river model was the phys-
ical tactile experience of experimentation with water in a
new way. Children spent hours trying different things and
learnt a lot but what they learnt is summed up in a few
sentences of shared writing.
 The river Thames 145

2 Children tend not to write about what they tried that

'didn't work', and so really only focus on the 'successful'
thing they did, however much encouragement they receive
from the model set by the teacher.
3 It is easy to underestimate the amount of time children need
to experiment/investigate in their own way. I was conscious
of time limits and so some activities were not followed up
as far as they might have been.
In light of her second point it was interesting to note that she did
in fact meet with some success in encouraging at least one child
to write about things that went wrong, in the task of making and
testing the paddle boat: 'It never worked. I put some sticky-back
plastic on it to make it waterproof but it went all soggy. So I
decided to make one out of plastic. I did the same as last time,
and it went brilliantly'.
 8
Seeing and light
YEAR 1 (5 AND 6-YEAR-OLDS)

Introduction

In preparing this chapter, I worked initially from the teacher's

own written account of her teaching, supplemented by her sub-
sequent comments on my first draft. At the time she was writing
she was particularly interested in the ideas that children bring to
their learning, the way they try to make sense of new experiences
and the way they develop new ideas. She recorded in consider-
able detail some of the classroom conversations and events, fol-
lowing closely at one point the progress of four pairs of children.
I have quoted extensively from her writing, so any quotations
not otherwise acknowledged are hers. The chapter ends with
what was the final section of her original account, in which she
reflects on the process of trying to develop ideas in other people's
minds. It is fitting that as this is the last in the series of case
studies, it should end with the direct voice of a teacher.
The topic was taught in the second half of the autumn term.
The children had already been in school for one, two or three terms
 Seeing and light 147

in the reception class in the previous school year. English was not
the first language for over 50 per cent of the class and the teacher
could not speak any of their home languages. Development of
language, and particularly of vocabulary, was therefore an import-
ant part of her day-to-day work, seeking to improve children's con-
fidence to express their ideas both orally and in writing in what
for many of them was their second language. She made a point
of listening carefully to make sure that as best she could she was
hearing the ideas some of the children were trying to express
behind their limited knowledge of English.
The presence of a language support teacher for a high pro-
portion of the week also allowed the teacher to work with small
groups in considerable depth, initiating (and recording) the con-
versations and interventions which were essential to support the
children's thinking. In her teaching generally she tried to main-
tain the appropriate balance between the need to direct and steer
children's thinking while providing children with opportunities
to test and sort out their own ideas. With this class, with so many
children still only 5 years old, she had a clear picture of the need
for structure:

Though the children had experienced science activities pre-

viously, this particular topic was organized in a more struc-
tured, developmental way, in terms of skills, processes and
concepts. I felt they needed clear teacher guidance and a firm
structure within which to work, to provide security when tack-
ling new concepts and skills, and because the class as a whole
was not with initiative.

The topic of Sight was prescribed in the school topic plans. It was
part of a whole-school topic on Light and Darkness in which dif-
ferent classes focused on different aspects. The teacher had some
autonomy over how she tackled the topic and what she attempted
to achieve. She planned initially to cover five main areas in the
following order:

• the physical features of the eye;

• the purpose of eyes;
• the link between seeing and light, i.e. that we cannot see with-
out light and that the pupil of the eye is a 'window' through
which light enters;
 -

rnYey

Figure 8.1 Four children's close observational drawings of the eye

 Seeing and light 149

• materials that you can and cannot see through (transparent,

translucent and opaque);
• individual differences in sight (including eye tests).
In the event the last two areas had to be abandoned, because
of the extended experience that was necessary for the earlier
work on the 'purpose of eyes'. The order, particularly of the first
three, was significant: working from something concrete which
the children could see and draw, to the more abstract idea of
purpose, and then to an attempt to understand that there is a
link between two separate things, i.e. between seeing and light.
She was aware of the research on children's understanding of the
connection between seeing and light from the SPACE project on
light (Osborne et a!. 1990) (see Chapter 2) and that she was likely
to have limited success in this area.

Learning about the physical features of the eye

Close observational drawings; data collection and

analysis
Apart from an initial discussion in which the children told the
teacher what they knew about seeing (they had two eyes, they
were unsure about the colour of their eyes, and they used them
for seeing), the first activity was close observational drawings of
their own eyes, using a mirror to see themselves (Figure 8.1 shows
four of the drawings). The drawings show the careful observa-
tion that young children can make. Most of the drawings show
eyelashes on both top and bottom lids, the pupil in the centre of
the iris, the colour of the iris, the iris extending to the two lids,
redness at either end of the eye, an eyebrow above the eye and
a reasonable shape for the eye itself. These drawings were also
copied with remarkable care on to the covers of their I-Spy books
(books in which they drew objects that they could see beginning
with different letters of the alphabet).
The original drawings were in colour and were displayed on
charts so that the differences in numbers of children with differ-
ent coloured eyes were immediately apparent. The colours of the
eyes of all the children in the class were also recorded by another
means, by the children writing their names in the appropriate
columns in the chart shown in Figure 8.2. The preponderance of
150 Creativity in primary science

brown blue.

mrs Da,
C

co

I'
b i" a

To

Figure 8.2 Chart to record distribution of colours of eyes

 Seeing and light 151

brown eyes was easily noticed, and the children came up with a
hypothesis that eye colour might be linked to ethnicity. They sub-
sequently collected data from the other two Year 1 classes, and iden-
tified that on the whole their hypothesis was reasonable.

Model of the parts of the eye — naming the parts

A small group in the class, working with a support teacher, made
the low-relief eye shown in Figure 8.3, and this was used for dis-
cussion about the names of the various parts of the eye and what
those parts did. The discussion extended to the position of the
eyes in relation to the rest of the body.

Conversations and interventions

The very first conversation revealed how little the children had
noticed about their eyes before the teaching started, so the later
realization that so many of the class had brown eyes was to them
a real discovery and a source of considerable surprise and amaze-
ment. The teacher urged them to talk about why they were sur-
prised. It emerged that the children had assumed that anyone who
had fair hair had blue eyes and that all White people also had
blue eyes, theories which were easily challenged by the evidence
in front of them. In response to the question 'Why do you think
there are so many children with brown eyes?' one Asian boy sug-
gested 'because we are Indian'. When the children looked round
the class (about 80 per cent of whom were of Asian origin) they
spotted that 'Indian children always have brown eyes', again a
point which they had not noticed before.
The teacher asked the children to consider how they could test
their idea, and in doing so we note one of the cases of an inter-
vention where the teacher is pressing the group to take their think-
ing one stage further. They suggested the idea of surveying the
whole school to see if it was true for a larger group — a sugges-
tion the teacher took up, but reduced the scale of the survey to
the other two Year 1 classes. A recording chart was drawn up by
the teacher, because it was beyond the scope of the children to
cross-reference two variables. With some help from the teacher
the children were able both to collect the data (she took two chil-
dren at a time into the other classes) and to put this data on to the
chart. The form of recording required the children to use a tally
for the counting, marking one stroke for each child in a particular
 bje.Jid
LLT

I
 Seeing and light 153

category and then counting up all the strokes at the end. Inter-
pretation was considered by the whole class through discussion
with the teacher. The boy who made the original hypothesis was
delighted to find that his hypothesis was borne out by the addi-
tional data.
The teacher's role during the original drawing exercise required
her merely to watch and identify any problems and quietly inter-
vene: 'If a child had any difficulties I intervened by drawing their
attention back to the real thing, encouraging them to correct their
own mistakes.' The commonest difficulty in this particular exer-
cise is that children tend to draw their mental image of an eye,
without checking it against the real thing; hence the iris is often
drawn as a small circle with lots of white round it, when in fact
it is rare that you can see white above and below the iris. The
teacher had to do little prompting to start children comparing their
eyes. 'Though working individually the children soon became
aware of similarities and differences through chatting with friends
and comparing pictures.'
The model eye provided several language exercises. One in-
volved learning the names of the parts of the eye and talking a
little about what the parts did; a second involved spotting lan-
guage links in many of the words, e.g. 'eyelid', 'eyebrow' and 'eye-
lash' all contain the word 'eye'. A third was a conversation about
one set of eyelashes which happened to have been stuck on the
wrong way round; the teacher asked the children to account for
why this was wrong. One child's response was 'because you would
blink, and blink and blink', indicating quite clearly that he under-
stood that this would cause a lot of irritation to the eye. The teacher
wrote in reflecting on this episode:

Comments such as this, and those contributed by the children

throughout the topic, increased my awareness of the wealth
of ideas children have and their ability to reason with unex-
pected logic. This in turn motivated me to take much more
account of their ideas as valid and relevant. The children
furnished further examples when my support teacher dis-
cussed the position of eyes in relation to other parts of the
body: 'What would happen if our eyes were at the back of
our heads?' One child, K, replied: 'We couldn't look where
we were going' and another, A, said 'Our feet face the other
way, so we would bump into things and fall over.'
154 Creativity in primary science

Summary of the first phase

At the end of the first phase of the topic, the children had a far
better knowledge of the eye than they had at the start. They had
learnt this to a large extent from their own observations. They
had put together data from the whole class and identified pat-
terns in the data (the high proportion of brown eyes). With teacher
support they had come up with a hypothesis to explain the pat-
terns in the data and collected further data to test the hypothesis.
They had also learnt the vocabulary to describe parts of the eye
and discussed the working parts and the position of the eye. They
had used three different forms of a table: the posters on which
the pictures of the eye had been collected; the lists of children
with blue, brown and hazel eyes; and a more sophisticated table
on which they had recorded nationality and eye colour.

Learning about the purpose of eyes

Reading and discussion

The start of the second phase involved reading many topic books
about the eye and discussing as a whole class 'what our eyes
help us do'; but a short written exercise in which the teacher
asked the children to write 'We use our eyes to...' produced
disappointing results. 'Their writing and pictures were uninspir-
ing, being mostly preoccupied with the simple act of looking or
seeing, rather than extending beyond that, i.e. to read, see col-
ours, to write, paint, etc.' She made the decision that the children
needed far more experience of actually trying activities with their
eyes open and closed than the one investigation she had origin-
ally planned. The children's reactions to the subsequent activities
and the conversations that she had with them about the results
bore out the wisdom of this decision.

Testing to find out what children could and could not

do with their eyes open and closed to learn about the
purpose of eyes
There was now, therefore, quite an extended period when the chil-
dren were involved in carrying out investigations. These fell into
two categories: those that the teacher designed and which were
 Seeing and light 155

tried out by all the children in the class, and those planned by a
small group of children who were particularly keen to extend their
investigations further. Those planned by the teacher required the
children to find out if, with their eyes closed, they could:
• cut out a circle properly;
• draw faces better than with their eyes open;
• follow a straight line of masking tape on the hall floor;
• tell shape and colour.

The investigations planned by the children, working in pairs, were

designed to find out if, without looking, people could:
• write better than with their eyes open (L and M);
• put together a jigsaw (B and L);
• see pictures in a book (S and N);
• build a bird table better than with their eyes open (D and M);
• put together a picture of a rabbit out of sticky paper (C and A).

Conversations and interventions — investigations

planned by the teacher
Figure 8.4 shows the results of one of the first investigations
tried, that of cutting out a circle with eyes shut and eyes open.
Note first, the simple means of recording: it is an early form of
a table with two columns each headed by a symbol of an eye
indicating whether the circle was cut with the eyes open or closed.
The use of sticky paper for the circles meant that the result of the
investigation could be transferred immediately to the recording
sheet. The recording sheets could also be displayed on the wall
so that children could see a pattern in the results, i.e. that every-
one was having difficulty in cutting out a circle.
This particular investigation, being the first, turned out to be
instrumental in changing children's ideas and giving them pause
for thought. They had started by making the predictions, with
considerable confidence, that they would be able to cut just as
good a circle with eyes shut as open, that they would be able to
draw faces and tell colour with comparative ease. The teacher
reported:
After watching one or two of their friends their confidence
in their predictions began to dissipate. Their responses varied:
156 Creativity in primary science

Figure 8.4 Results of 'Can we cut out a circle as well with our eyes
shut as with them open?'

K, after viewing his attempt at cutting while blindfolded said

with amused despair 'It's very difficult'. . Not only did they
.

test their own predictions, but the visible recorded results

forced them to question what were firmly held convictions.
The teacher wrote that they began to wonder that 'if they
couldn't cut out well without looking, would they be able to do
other things?'. Predictions about subsequent investigations were
 Seeing and light 157

more tentative, 'consisting of many more "nos" and rather hesit-

ant "not sures", showing that the children were applying what
they had learnt to another situation. The results of drawing faces
showed similar difficulties to cutting out a circle.
In talking to me about this topic the teacher could still recall
vividly the looks of puzzlement and amazement on the children's
faces as the results began to emerge. These investigations were
some of the 'significant events' in this teaching sequence; those
points at which a teacher recognizes that a new level of curiosity
has been aroused; that existing experience and thought is being
challenged.
There was also anxiety — in some cases, quite serious. It is
important to realize that such events can make children feel very
unsettled. There are two situations combined in these investiga-
lions which make children sense that they are not succeeding and
are 'wrong'. The first is making predictions only to find that their
predictions are wrong, and the second is failing to cut out and
draw properly. They both contributed to the children's unease,
but a recognition that they were all in the same boat with their
predictions helped to ease their feelings; and the fact that the
teacher joined in all the investigations, showing that she could
not do things with her eyes shut either, was also important. As
the topic went on, these anxieties faded.
Many of the conversations, especially in the early investigations,
focused on 'cheating' and 'fairness' of the way investigations
were carried out. 'Cheating' could involve letting the blindfold
slip slightly so that the experimenter could in fact see; it was
always the other children who could recognize whether others
were cheating by the extent of their success in completing an
activity The children began to decide their own criteria for deter-
mining fairness, for instance, they insisted on tying blindfolds
tight on everyone. Alternatively cheating could be that different
clues were given in games such as 'Blind Man's Buff', a game that
was played as part of PE. The teacher reported: 'A was quickly
denounced because he kept talking which according to C was
unfair: "You can tell who he is because of his voice".' These
discussions were, however, productive; by the time the children
came to try to walk along a straight line marked on the hail floor
with masking tape, there was no need to use blindfolds, the
children just shut their eyes. They enjoyed the feeling of trust
that had developed between them, and the teacher was aware of
158 Creativity in primary science

the children's growing recognition that cooperation and fair play

were essential if the activity was going to be of any value.
The last of the investigations devised by the teacher involved
trying to decide whether shape and colour can be identified just
by feeling. Coloured plastic shapes were used and one was put
secretly into a 'feely' bag. The children had to put their hand in
and decide which shape and what colour the object was. One
child insisted that he could feel that a particular object was blue,
because, he explained, it was slippery like another blue one they
had tried earlier.

Conversations and interventions — children's own

investigations
The change to investigations devised by the children afforded the
teacher insight into their understanding of the planning process,
which of course cannot be seen from investigations devised by
the teacher. The first of these investigations occurred quite spon-
taneously. After trying the investigation on drawing faces, L and
M rushed off to see if they could do any better writing instead
of drawing. They started by writing the alphabet, only to come
unstuck because they could not write all of it with their eyes
open, let alone closed. When the teacher suggested that they write
something that they knew, M suggested writing 'I am. .' followed
.

by their name. They went away and completed the test with ease.
Because of the policy of not including individual children's names
in the book, the results cannot be included, but they met with more
success than in drawing the faces with their eyes shut; the writ-
ing was not as good, however, as with their eyes open.
The children who planned their own investigations were effect-
ively self-selected. They had shown great interest in the work and
taken considerable initiative. They were not, in conventional terms,
the brightest or most intelligent — there were others who were
more skilled at reading and writing — but they were incredibly
enthusiastic about the experimental work. L and M were of course
in this group. The teacher put them in pairs (B and L, S and N,
D and M, A and C) and asked them to devise more tests that they
could try out on themselves and other people.
B and L decided to find out if people could do a jigsaw with
their eyes closed. They started with a plastic number jigsaw, in
which numbers had to be slotted into appropriate slots on a board.
 Seeing and light 159

see '5 we need e9es Lo do

Figure 8.5 Results of picture jigsaw used by B and L to find out if

people could do a jigsaw with their eyes closed
This proved relatively easy — B and L realized this was
so because it was easy to feel the shapes. They then moved to
a picture jigsaw, and the teacher helped them to draw up an
appropriate recording chart (see Figure 8.5); they were of course
able to make suggestions about what chart they needed them-
selves because it was similar to the ones used for earlier invest-
igations. When they looked at the results, they could say that
people could not do jigsaws with their eyes closed, and this the
teacher wrote for them on the bottom of the chart. In talking
with the other children about the design of the investigation they
recognized that the jigsaw that they had chosen had rather too
many pieces, so the test took quite a long time. If they did it
again they would try to find one with fewer pieces. This pro-
vides a nice example of very young children being able to evalu-
ate the design of their own investigations.
S and N wanted to know whether people could identify pictures
in a book with their eyes closed. 'They failed to find a "satisfac-
tory" picture in a book so disappeared next door to draw their
own, in "secret isolation".' They drew two pictures, and the subject
was asked what was on each one. The teacher raised the question
of whether the person tested would do it with their eyes open or
closed first. After considerable thought they realized that if it was
done with eyes open first, people might remember what was on
the pictures, so they had better do it with eyes closed first.
160 Creativity in primary science

A and C's investigation involved children trying to make the

face of a rabbit from sticky shapes. A and C cut out the shapes
in advance and put them in separate pots (eyes, face, ears). They
also cut out sheets of paper on which to stick the shapes to make
the face. The reader needs to imagine the laughter and amuse-
ment that accompanied these trials as eyes and ears were stuck
all over the place, and in one case half the face missed the page
altogether. One child did, however, manage to make a reasonable
picture which led to discussion of how this was so. The children
realized that he was able to focus his mind on the feel of the pieces
and work from tactile information.
The reader also needs to imagine the conversations that occurred
between the children and teacher in refining the design of this
investigation. The design, as completed, is quite sophisticated. It
is relatively quick to do, the results can be seen easily and the
record kept and displayed.
The investigation into building a bird table devised by D and
M proved more problematic than the others because of a compli-
cation which they inadvertently built into it at one point. They
had headed off at first to make a 'world' out of 3D shapes (this
was a new concept which had come out of discussion). 'They
finally — with much prodding — decided to see if people could
build a bird table from 3D shapes, while blindfolded.' D decided
this was too difficult without instructions, so proceeded to draw
some. When the first subject was asked to try the investigation,
D wanted to know if he could build a bird table with and with-
out the instructions, while M wanted to know whether he could
do it with and without a blindfold. The poor subject ended up
rather confused, with D and M not understanding why! They
had drifted into the trap of trying to test two variables at the
same time, and it took a lot of help from the teacher for them
to be able to simplify the experiment. D and M's confidence and
enthusiasm revived as she helped them out. She also provided
the format for recording the results although she did use their
suggestions.
In reflecting on these episodes of children trying to devise their
own investigations, the teacher wrote:

This was relatively unfamiliar territory for the children, which

involved me contributing a tremendous amount of support
guidance and motivation, while refraining from telling them
 Seeing and light 161

exactly what to do. It was exhausting work, constantly rephras-

ing, making tentative suggestions, yet withdrawing to give
them space to work things out for themselves. It would have
been impossible without support to preoccupy the remain-
ing children.

Summary of learning about the purpose of eyes

The teacher's own summary focuses on the intensity of involve-
ment of the children:
The critical reflection, investigation and process skills which
were involved in these activities speak for themselves. The
communication between the partners and other children was
a delight to hear and rewarding in itself. Added to which the
children came away with an immense amount of satisfaction.

Learning about the link between seeing and light

Before the teacher moved to exploring a link between seeing and

light, she decided it was important first to have some activities
to help the children think about light itself. She asked them to
draw sources of light at night and during the day so that she
could find out what ideas they had, a technique also used by the
SPACE project.

Exploring the effect of light (and no light) on seeing

and on the eye
The two main practical activities used here were devised by the
teacher. The first was to find out if the children could see if there
was no light at all. The second was to discover the effect of light
on the size of the pupil of the eye.
Finding a place where there is no light is not easy. The teacher
simulated what often happens when people go on guided trips
into caves. At one point a guide gets everyone settled comfortably
deep underground, where no light drifts in via shafts, and then
says, 'For about three seconds you are now going to see what abso-
lute darkness looks like', and proceeds to turn off the underground
electric lights. Pitch black is indeed an unusual experience for
162 Creativity in primary science

most people, and it is slightly eerie. The members of the party on

the tour usually have complete trust that the guide will turn the
light back on after the allotted time, and the trust is warranted.
The teacher's nearest approximation to a cave was the large sta-
tionery cupboard in her room. It had no windows, and when the
door was shut and the light turned out it was reasonably dark
(she had nowhere where it was completely dark). In it the chil-
dren were surrounded by brightly coloured paper and card and
packets with writing on. Like the guides in the caves, she settled
the group with the light on and told them she would only turn the
light out for a short time, which she did. She knew that the first
exercise would cause excitement and 'spooky' feelings. The first
visit was done therefore as a language exercise, asking the children
to talk (and later write) about what it feels like to be in complete
darkness. Only after the excitement had worn off did she repeat
it with a focus on science. 'What can you see now?' (with the
light on). The children told her all the things they could see first.
'Keep your eyes open, so they are still working. When I turn the
light off I want you to look around and tell me what you can
see.' When it became evident that however wide they opened
their eyes, they were having difficulty seeing things, the children
began to appreciate that perhaps the light did have something to
do with seeing.
Amongst the various discussions that were provoked by this
experience was the subject of sources of light. The teacher asked
the children to draw things that they thought gave off light. The
discussions with individuals about what they had drawn are de-
scribed below. (Eyes — either their own, with drawings similar to
ones drawn earlier in the term, or cat's eyes — feature in many of
the drawings.)
The teacher also designed an experiment on the pupil of the
eye. She wanted the children to know that the black pupil in the
centre of the iris was a 'window' into the eye, that light went into
it, and that it changed size from small when there was a lot of
light, to large when there was little light. The experiment involved
the children looking at the sizes of the teacher's pupils and their
own pupils when they were in dark and light places. She had
made the pictorial scale for measuring size on which the children
wrote L and D for the sizes of the pupils in light and dark places
respectively (Figure 8.6). The children simply held the gauge next
to their noses, just below the eye, and found the size of dot which
 Seeing and light 163

L
- 2345
LI IL.3 f Tél
L ' ! ''SI
L 125b
Figure 8.6 Gauges used for measuring eye size (with results
marked)

matched the pupil size the best. As the organization of such an

activity is often the key to its success, especially with such young
children, I have included the teacher's exact sequence of teaching
for this part of the work in Figure 8.7. It is noticeable that she has
started with a demonstration of what to do, has worked with the
children and then left them to try it by themselves.

Conversations and interventions

The teacher had kept detailed notes of responses from the chil-
dren, and although transcripts of conversations are notoriously
164 Creativity in primary science

How does light get into our eyes?

Relating pupil size to available light
(i) Return trip to dark cupboard — reminding the children that we need light to see
(ii) Ask: How do you think light gets into our eyes?
(iii) Cloakroom: I cover my eyes, count to ten, remove my hand, children observe any
change in pupil size. Repeat with children.
(iv) Using torch: observe effect of bright light on pupil size
(v) Investigate using pupil gauge (gauge held up to nose): — dark cloakroom versus
bright light torch
(vi) Comparison of results — general trend for everyone? Discussion
(vii) Return to classroom: refer to non-fiction book on pupil size
(viii) In pairs or singly children then explore the classroom/cloakroom using a mirror —
trying to find places where their pupils are bigger or smaller. They come and tell me
and relate it to darker' and 'lighter' situations.
(xi) Discussion of too bright light being dangerous i.e. never look at the sun.
What do we use to protect/shade our eyes?

Figure 8.7 Teaching sequence for work on relating the size of the
pupil of the eye to the available light

difficult to interpret, I decided that they would be valuable to

include here.
In sharing their observations about what they could see in the
cupboard, this small group noticed both the difficulty of seeing
and the fact that in dim light everything looks monochrome.
M: It was too dark to see.
D and L: Everything looks the same colour (lights off)...
because you can see the colour less.
A: The writing is best [i.e. to see] with the light.
. . .

Amongst the responses to 'How do you think light gets into

your eyes?', there is the idea that light comes to the eyes. One
child shares information from another source (sister) about what
the pupils really are (holes), while another makes the suggestion
that perhaps they are not holes at all, but only look like holes
because they are black:
K: Light comes to our eyes.
N: Light shines in our eyes.
N: My sister says pupils are holes.
A: They look like plastic. . they look like holes because
. . . .

they are black.

In another group, they talk of the light getting into the eyes because
they are open:
 Seeing and light 165

H: It shines.
B: When we see light it gets in our eyes.
P: . Because our eyes are open.
. .

Another group start off on the fact that you can go blind if light
gets into your eyes (the teacher had previously warned the chil-
dren not to look at the sun when they were trying the pupil
investigation) and she has to redirect their attention to the ori-
ginal question she asked. Later she presses the children for further
explanation when she says 'How did we catch it?':
R: Because you get blind.
B: When light comes in your eyes, you go to hospital.
Teacher: But when you just want to see something...
B: The light comes out of the eye.
A: The sun is out and the lights are on. When you turn
the light on it comes in our eyes, when you turn it
off, it doesn't.
M: Electricity comes into the light and it gets on. We
catch some light.
Teacher: How do we catch it?
M: By our eye.
The teacher posed the question 'Do our pupils look the same all
the time?' to one group of children prior to their watching the
pupils of her eyes during the demonstration. One child shows
quite clearly that he had noticed the phenomenon before, or at
least had read about it in the book which was available in the
classroom:
N: Yes.
A: Sometimes big, sometimes, small. Near the window they
go smaller near the sun.
The question Why do you think they go smaller and bigger?'
provoked interesting answers, including a sense of wonderment
in the use of the word 'magic'. I suppose on reflection it is like
magic: it happens all by itself, you do not appear to do anything
and you cannot feel it happening! From another group it elicited
the comment that the child was making a connection with a pre-
vious experience of watching her baby sister's eyes:
V: It's magic.
B: Because the light comes in, it goes smaller. . it's magic.
.
166 Creativity in primary science

A: The little bit of thing under your eye — when it's dark,
dark gets into your eyes and gets it bigger. Light gets right
into your eyes and it gets small.
N: When my baby sister opens her eyes, the pupils go smaller.
M: If we were in the cupboard and it was dark we couldn't
read.
K: More light gets in our eyes when it's bigger.
B: It scares someone in the dark.

During discussion of the pupil in the topic book (the pupil as a

window), the following exchanges occurred, showing that some
are connecting the pupil with light going into the eye:
M: First they punched a hole in your eye then they put it in.
A: I knew it was a hole — the light gets into your eye.
A: When your eyes need only a little light they [pupils] go
smaller.
B: When you go to sleep and you want to see, then you
open your eyes and light comes through.
L: [having considered the pupil as a window, said with a
sudden look of illumination] The light gets in!
In reflecting on the studies on pupil size (through investiga-
tion and reading in books) the teacher commented:
I learnt from this exercise the value of working in small
enough groups to ensure the quiet children have their say;
the value of providing occasions when assessment of under-
standing is through activity rather than paper-bound record-
ing. It was also noticeable that however well structured an
investigation, children may well often reach true understand-
ing when left to explore by themselves. It was interesting
too, how much better the children could relate to the fact-
ual information in a topic book, once they had experienced
the phenomenon involved. Yet how many times do we as
teachers attempt to introduce a topic by using books as start-
ing points?
The drawings of sources of light provided the teacher with
the opportunity to talk with children individually. When asked
about the cat's eyes, C commented that 'They've got eyes and at
night they make you look, in the morning you can't see the eyes
 Seeing and light 167

properly.' When she was asked why you can't see them in the
morning, she explained 'because it's too bright'. It seemed to the
teacher that C was relating back to a previous conversation about
the fact that fireworks can be seen better at night than during the
day, because 'it's too bright in the morning'.
A conversation with D about his drawing shows the difficulty
of children distinguishing a source of light from something that
is bright:
Teacher: What have you drawn coming from the room light?
That's the light. . it sort of. . . comes off in lines.
.

You can see it when you switch on.

Teacher: Why did you draw the light like that? [pointing to
representation of torch beam]
Because it come out. . goes like that.. and then
. .

stops.
Teacher: Does a cloud give us light?
D: Yes, they are very bright.
'This was unexpected and is probably because D is linking 'light'
and 'bright' — not entirely mistakenly so. My only idea was to
call his attention to clouds on a dark gloomy or rainy day when
the sun was hidden and compare that to the bright sunny day
when the clouds appeared white.'
Conversations with the children towards the end revealed a
growing awareness of the importance of eyes for seeing and that
somehow light was connected with seeing. I shall end the chapter
with the teacher's own summary from her original account.

The teacher's reflections as summary

The children's responses to the different activities were as
varied as their individual development. Some of the chil-
dren reached their potential early on and tended to see the
activities as enjoyable isolated incidents, while others with
more maturity of thought took new ideas on board, tested
them and then applied their new-found knowledge and skills
to other situations. . . However there was no guarantee that
the children interpreted the new experiences and concepts
in exactly the way I had intended. 'Interpretation' is a very
personal process influenced by a whole range of factors, includ-
ing previous experience, knowledge and prejudice. This applies
168 Creativity in primary science

as much to children as it does to adults. Nor is this a startling

revelation. Tolstoy in War and Peace, Volume 1, Book Two, part
III encapsulates much of the spirit of what Osborne, Freyberg
and Harlen have generally argued is the case for children.
Count Pierre Bezukhov has been trying to put across his
ideas to fellow freemasons but notes:
At the meeting he was struck for the first time by the
endless variety of men's minds, which prevents a truth
from ever presenting itself identically to two persons.
Even those members who seemed to be on his side
understood him in their own way, with limitations and
alterations he could not agree to, as what he always
wanted most was to convey his thought to others just as
he himself understood it.
Although arguing a point of philosophy as opposed to 'sci-
ence' Tolstoy highlights the problem of interpretation.
Any development in the scientific thinking and under-
standing of young children has to build upon the base which
already exists and make allowances for what the children
bring with them. No outcome is ultimately predictable, be-
cause the individual child 'will organise their experiences
into some pattern personal to themselves' (Schools Council
1972: 5).
It is for the teacher such as myself to provide the structure
and opportunity for children to experience new concepts in
a meaningful way, and to provide them with examples of
good scientific methodology. Helping them to develop their
process skills as part and parcel of the actual concepts, enables
the children to explore and investigate to the best of their abil-
ity. Above all one requires endless patience because the pro-
cess resembles a journey where you take five steps forward
only to take three steps back.
Part 3
 9
From action to reflection

This last chapter is devoted to stepping back from the busy class-
rooms to review the events that occurred within them, in light of
the discussions in Chapters 1 and 2.

Knowing some science

In Chapter 2, elements of what 'knowing some science' might

mean were outlined. The contribution of the teaching described
in the case studies to this knowing is fairly self-evident. The chil-
dren know more things than they did before, not just as informa-
tion or facts from books, but as information which is understood
and can be related to experiences they have had and to things
that they have explored in their own environment. They have
enhanced their understanding of scientific concepts. They have
realized that 'in science' teachers expect them to ask questions
and to give explanations; they are involved in wresting informa-
lion from practical experiences by drawing and investigating; they
172 Creativity in primary science

are encouraged to look at their data and consider evidence ser-

iously. Several of the studies relate their classroom studies to large
scale phenomena (the river Thames, the Channel tunnel) and many
have examples of environmental issues being illuminated by an
understanding of science.

Knowing about the natural and made worlds

The children have learnt a whole range of information about the
natural and made world: about the organs inside their bodies,
about their heartbeat and how its rate of beating increases with
exercise; about the number of bones in their bodies and that
there are muscles joined to the bones; about the many different
minibeasts that live almost undetected in the school grounds,
about their life cycles and what they might eat; about fish having
scales and how their tails move to make them go forwards; about
the complex flow patterns as water runs down a channel; about
the erosion of soil and mud; about the fact that rocks can absorb
a considerable volume of water and that tunnels need to be lined;
about the pupil of the eye changing shape in different light condi-
tions. Perhaps the child's account at the end of Chapter 6 about
what he had learnt about the Channel tunnel — where there was
so much learnt that he could hardly get it all down on paper —
gives an indication of just how much 'general knowledge' about
science can be learnt in one of these topics.

Understanding explanation
There are many instances where the teachers asked children to make
links between pieces of information, and in doing so were hunting
for explanations, while at the same time introducing new concepts.
The concept of the 'function' of parts of a system appeared in sev-
eral of the studies: the function of the fins and tail of the fish for
movement; the function of the paddle in making the boat move;
the function of joints in enabling the body to have moving parts.
Hunting for explanations and links was triggered by ques-
tions asked by the teacher such as: What does this do? How does
it work? What is it for? How is it made? Why is it like that? The
chapters are full of questions or discussions that require links to
be made, explanations to be sought. Why do you think people
found it easier to distinguish the sound of the shells than any
 From action to reflection 173

other sound? Why did the French have to have rubber tunnel
linings? Why did they build the tunnel where they did? What
are the factors that make the container sink? What are the factors
that give a boat a large carrying capacity? Why do you think
there are so many earthworms by the car park? Why did we see
so many frogs in Epping Forest on our trip out? What are the
ways in which rabies can be spread? Why can't we see when
we turn the light out? Why can't we do a jigsaw when we shut
our eyes? How does a compass work? How do you find your
way underground?
Work was planned so that opportunities for making explana-
tions were provided. In the paddle boat, the teacher deliberately
gave precise instructions, with minimal choice over design, so that
everyone would have a successful boat and hence have a chance
of explaining how the boat worked. It would be easy for a teacher
to make the construction of the boat take up so much time that
there was no time for explaining.

Being familiar with scientific concepts

It is impossible to say that someone 'has' a concept that is com-
plete, finished, polished and stable for ever. The case studies give
'windows' on emerging concepts. The list at the end of Chapter
3 gives an indication of a typical way in which a teacher might
describe how far children have reached in their understanding.
The list gives the concepts intrinsic to the topic with descriptions
of the sort of understanding that the children were acquiring.
The means by which the teacher found out about the children's
understanding as she went about the day-to-day teaching par-
alleled the techniques used in much of the research described in
Chapter 2, i.e. listening to the children's statements and questions,
looking at the products of their work, watching their interactions
with tasks, noting the books they could understand. She was
aware that by the end of the topic children could say far more in
response to the question 'What is a wood?' than they said at the
start; they would be able to give more examples of something
or describe their characteristics in answer to questions like 'Tell
me about insects'; or by being able to explain a phenomenon, in
answer to questions like 'How do you get new plants?'
The development of concepts involves the enlargement of knowl-
edge and often makes the knowledge less tied to one specific
174 Creativity in primary science

instance. It also often involves the ability to articulate intuit-

ive knowledge. In the topic on the river Thames, the children
ended with a far better appreciation of the concept of a 'fish';
they thought they knew what a fish looked like until they were
asked to draw it; they thought they knew what a fish was, until
they were asked to define it; they thought they knew how a fish
moved until they looked. They ended with knowledge that they
would be able to apply to a question, 'Is a shark a fish?', with a
chance of answering 'Yes', whereas before the topic the automatic
answer would probably have been 'No'.
In the Channel tunnel project the Year 6 group have enlarged
their concept of 'rocks' by looking at several different types, by
knowing that rocks have different hardnesses, different colours,
different fracturing properties, different structures.. They have
.

altered their idea that a rock (or set of rocks as on a continent)

is fixed for ever, to an awareness that rocks are being continu-
ously recycled within the earth's crust. They might have reserva-
tions about the expression 'as solid as a rock'.
They have enlarged their concept of properties of materials in
relation to materials other than rocks: the linings of the tunnel,
the materials for the tunnel boring machines. They have thought
again about the concept of an environment and the making of a
landscape which will be a suitable habitat for certain plants and
animals.
By making a model tunnel boring machine, they will have
used their knowledge of electric circuits and motors and hence
reinforced the ideas that they had previously.
The Year 1 group have a richer knowledge of the eye, both of
its structure and its function. They have a growing awareness of
what is a source of light, and that when there is no source of light
it is dark.
The Year 2 group know lots of individual facts about their
bodies, but are beginning to think of the body as made up of
parts that 'do something'; it is the start of the recognition that the
body can be thought of as a highly complex living 'machine' made
up of several organs.

Asking questions
The children in the case studies asked quite a lot of scientific ques-
tions. The Year 2 class in Chapter 5 learnt how to ask questions
 From action to reflection 175

from their ID cards, repeating the exercise with different pairs

of variables (handspan and arm length, height and spine length).
Just learning what questions were was an important part of the
work.
The teacher in Chapter 3 (Parks, woods and wastelands) struc-
tured her teaching to work with the way people slowly grope
towards the asking of questions. She recognized that encounters
were important, but enhanced the chance of something coming
out of the encounters by alerting children to the importance of
using their senses. She had many activities which involved chil-
dren in working with, or finding out, information about minibeasts
(some of this was from observing the minibeasts themselves, some
was from what people had written in books). She recognized that
during these activities children's own questions would arise and,
by having Professor Question in the classroom, had a means of
collecting them for later consideration. The generation and collec-
tion of questions occurred over a period of about three weeks;
the sorting of the questions took place once sufficient questions
had been collected; the sorting exercise generated even more
questions; the final selection of ones which could be investigated
was an important activity in its own right, even before the invest-
igations were undertaken; the undertaking of the investigations
generated still more questions. The structure of her teaching had
worked with the natural flow of the mental processes while at the
same time enhancing what could be achieved through them.
The same teacher commented that she could judge the level of
understanding by the questions which were being asked; when
group A asked only very general questions, she decided that they
needed more experience and knowledge of living things and of
habitats. She was effectively acknowledging that the more people
know about something the more they are likely to ask questions,
and also that the more they know, the more they have confidence
to ask questions.
Some of the confidence to ask questions is generated by the
teacher valuing questions and the teacher modelling the asking
of questions herself. Some comes from the children learning to
value questions in their own right as a way into further knowl-
edge and understanding. The latter will only come if children do
indeed have success in using their questions fruitfully.
It seems important to get away from the notion that questions
come bubbling out of children in a form that is easy to use and
176 Creativity in primary science

that children will automatically ask questions about all the things
teachers want them to learn. The very deliberate strategies used
by the teachers in the case studies to enhance the children's abil-
ity to ask well-focused questions and to know how to go about
answering them should at least give pause for thought, if not
challenge the notion entirely.
It would be a mistake to leave this section without acknowledg-
ing the role teachers' own knowledge plays in their willingness
to entertain questioning. Research shows that teachers become
more and more didactic, adopting a 'transmission' mode of teach-
ing, the less they know about a subject. Does the willingness of
the teachers in the six case studies to encourage and foster the
asking of questions represent in fact a considerable knowledge of
science?

Understanding experiments

The PACKS research highlighted the fact that knowing how to

proceed in an investigation requires knowledge of procedures.
Knowledge cannot be built up without experience, but experi-
ence alone is not sufficient. The teacher plays a significant role in
her discussions with pupils about their experiences.
The case studies in Chapters 3, 4 and 8 have the most detailed
accounts of teachers helping children to sort out the design of the
investigations. In each case the teachers support the children in
decision making, they do not make the decisions for them. They
help the children think about all the facets of the investigation
(see Rabbit's House in Chapter 4, and the earthworm study in
Chapter 3). In both of these cases the teachers discussed the work
sufficiently beforehand with the children for them to get started
in a sensible way, but left one or two loose ends so that when the
children embarked on the investigation there were still features
to think about.
Teachers also have to help modify designs which would other-
wise make an investigation invalid. For instance, the teacher in
Chapter 8 had to help the children understand why their invest-
igation on whether people could build a bird table with and with-
out their eyes shut, or with and without the instructions, confused
the person being tested. She had to help them test only one variable
at a time instead of two.
 From action to reflection 177

While much of the success of the investigations lay in the

teachers being able to anticipate (and support the children through)
the different stages of the investigations, some resulted from their
ability to identify relatively simple investigations that were appro-
priate and could be done within the constraints that operate in
primary classrooms.

Interpreting data
Research from APU, from the studies in Durham and from the
PACKS project shows that without help many learners pay little
attention to evidence or perhaps need far more help than is often
recognized in being able to make sense of it.
The case studies show several strategies teachers used to help
children value data and to go back to the evidence they had in
front of them. There is the Year 1 group in Chapter 8 having to
face up to the evidence that they could not cut out circles with
their eyes shut, even though they believed strongly beforehand
that they could. Part of this teacher's success came from the fact
that the evidence could easily be recorded so that children had
something tangible to go back to and talk about. She had sim-
ilarly found two simple ways to display the eye colour of all the
children, so that it was possible to see the proportion of different
colour eyes in the class.
The teacher of the Year 4 class in Chapter 7, in the river Thames
topic, insisted that the children kept going back to the object or
phenomenon under observation and drawing and writing about
what they saw, not what they knew. Her insistence on this valuing
of evidence improved the quality of observation both in the cases
of the fish and prawn and the later work on the paddle boat and
water flow in the channel.
The teacher of the Years 1 and 2 class who helped the children
examine the data from Rabbit's House used a well-tried tech-
nique for looking at data, i.e. she asked the children merely to
describe it first. Often interpretation starts too early, before peo-
ple have had a good look at what is there. Just as the teacher
in Chapter 6 asked the children to look at the structure and the
movement of fish, before she linked structure and movement, so
having a good look at the data should precede interpretation and
explanation. The questions used to help children describe the data
in Rabbit's House were: 'Which one has more ticks than crosses?'
178 Creativity in primary science

'Which has more crosses than ticks?' 'Where are they the same?'
'What else do you notice?' 'Which ones did children try the most?'
She often followed her questions with another, 'How do you
know?', requiring more detailed description of the evidence. She
used comparison, 'Did everyone find that?', and made the chil-
dren search the other recording sheets to see if there were similar
patterns there.
Only when the data had been described did she seek explana-
tions: 'Why do you think children tried that one the most?' 'Which
was the most difficult to identify?' 'How do you know?' 'Why
do you think that was so?' 'Did everyone find that?' 'Which was
the easiest?' The conclusions drawn were tentative: 'Christopher
thought...'
The children in the Year 2 class trying to answer the ques-
tions from their ID cards had been taught a simple technique for
exploring data: they put the information in numerical order, not
by rearranging it physically on the table, but by marking the
order with 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. against the measurements.
Valid conclusions can of course only be drawn from evid-
ence if the evidence itself is valid. Poor design of investigations
generates useless evidence; if children are to value the evidence,
they must value the design. The evidence can also be spoiled if
the necessary technical know-how and practical skills are not there
to execute the investigation well.

Having technical know-how

The case studies give examples of the children learning or prac-

tising a range of technical tasks which will increase their mani-
pulative skills and their general technical competence: handling
small animals without damaging them; using hand lenses; meas-
uring out the area to be used for the earthworm search; develop-
ing the fine control needed for using dropping pipettes to add
drops of ink to the water flowing down the channel; using a
cutting knife to cut the corroflute accurately, pressing pins vert-
ically through the paper on to the corroflute in order to transfer
the plan from paper to plastic; using the weighing scales for the
chalk and measuring cylinders for estimating the volume of water
absorbed; using scissors for the many investigations in 'Seeing
and light'.
 From action to reflection 179

Linking science and everyday occurrences

Science in primary schools has the advantage that it is often set
within an integrated topic, whereby the science is automatic-
ally embedded within a context which is wider than the science
itself and which has strong elements of the 'everyday' about it:
the parks and woodlands, the river Thames, the Channel tunnel,
the human body...

Appreciating the nature of science

The Pine class scientist embodies a lot of the nature of science.
It is probably worth going back to the picture on page 82 and
noting the many aspects of science which are incorporated in
this image.
It is hard to tell what picture of science is building up in these
children's minds even though most facets of 'knowing some sci-
ence' are present in all the case studies. I suspect, however, that
what enables these teachers to take children on a journey which
does justice to the children and the subject is that they have an
appreciation of the nature of science themselves and are aware
of the different elements. They will vary in their knowledge of
specific facts and explanations, and the extent to which their
knowledge of the nature of science is articulated.

Appreciating the cultural significance of science

It is a tall order for young children to recognize the cultural signi-
ficance of science; the groundwork is, nevertheless, being laid at
this stage. We can note that the Year 6 class became fully involved
in understanding the legal controls necessary for preventing ani-
mals coming through the tunnel, and that they became aware that
just because it is possible to do something (in this case build the
tunnel) then it is not necessarily the right thing to do.

Construction and reconstruction of knowledge as a

means of knowing
In reviewing the case studies in the light of the discussion of
'knowing some science' I have also discussed many of the strat-
egies that teachers used to organize, plan and manage the learn-
180 Creativity in primary science

ing, and in so doing have returned to the themes in Chapter 1.

There is, however, one theme, the children as 'meaning makers'
in the classroom, that I want to separate out for special mention,
before ending with some of the features that were important to
the six teachers and a final thought about creativity
Much of the new-found understanding of facts, concepts and
explanations is inextricably linked to the practical experiences that
teachers provide, combined with the mental processing and repro-
cessing of ideas through talking, writing, reading, drawing and
model making.
The case studies are full of examples of the deliberate use of the
fact that writing, drawing, or talking about a subject being learnt
is an intrinsic part of that learning. The preparation of the class
book of Rabbit's House required the children to reflect on what
they had learnt, systematize it, and in doing so enabled them to
learn it better. When the class settled to writing the questionnaire
about people's attitudes to the Channel tunnel, they were forced
to think quite deeply about what it was they wanted to know.
The use of 'jigsawing' in the organization of the book research on
boats in the case study on the river Thames required the children
not only to find out information from books, but to reconstruct
it for another audience. In the same topic, children not only wrote
their own observations of the flow of water in the channel, and
in doing so, clarified their own understanding, they also had to
reconstruct their knowledge in combining it with that of other
children to produce their shared writing. It is no wonder that the
teachers place such a high value on children's ability to communi-
cate in as many ways as possible; because in the process of com-
municating, new understandings are formed. Language was high
on the agenda for them all. I have included in the references two
books by Karen Gallas (1994, 1995) in which she explores the role
of language and communication in the learning of science.
Many of the techniques which the teachers used in helping
children make sense of information from secondary sources can
be found elaborated in books such as those by Mallett (1992) and
Neate (1992).

Features important to the six teachers

In his article about what knowledge teachers need for subject
teaching, McDiarmid Williamson and colleagues (1987: 194) wrote:
 From action to reflection 181

'Connecting pupils with subject matter entails weaving together

ideas about how people learn and knowledge about particular
pupils with a thorough understanding of the subject in ways that
respect the integrity of each.'
In the conversations with the six teachers whose case studies
appear in Chapters 3 to 8, each teacher invariably selected, with-
out prompting, events that were of particular significance. I hope
that in writing the case studies I have adequately indicated them.
They all centred on 'connecting the pupil...' and knowing that
a connection had been made. Here are just a few: Professor Sense
and Professor Question in Chapter 3; the joy of realizing that
patterns in data emerge 'as you go along' if you use the modi-
fied table in Rabbit's House; the realization that it is possible to
investigate yourself in Chapter 6; the problem of the tunnel to
the swimming pool in Chapter 7 helping children understand
the issues involved in tunnel building; the amazement and dis-
tress of children in Chapter 8 when they found that they could
not cut out circles with their eyes closed, but the laughter and
understanding that accompanied the later investigations.
Teachers' actions were also selected for special mention, such as
the teacher in Chapter 3 consciously holding back on answering
questions to give children space to come up with their own ideas;
the teacher in Chapter 4 leaving 'a loose end' in the design of a
table so she could raise the question of modification and improve-
ment; the teacher in Chapter 7 emphasizing the constant review-
ing of learning which she did with the whole class, and the way
she was consciously acting as a role model on how to review learn-
ing; the teacher in Chapter 8 taking part in the investigations to
reduce the anxiety of children 'failing' in investigations.
What came through all their conversations was an intrinsic
interest in the learning process; in what was learnt; in how they
as teachers knew what was learnt; in understanding the process
of learning itself; and in their own role in this process.
Mary Jane Drummond wrote in her book, Assessing Children's
Learning (1994: 10): 'It is children's learning that must be the sub-
ject of teachers' most energetic care and attention — not their les-
son plans, or their schemes of work, or their rich and stimulating
provision — but the learning that results from everything they do
(and do not do) in schools and classrooms.'
On the same page she wrote: The process of assessing children's
learning — by looking closely at it and striving to understand it
182 Creativity in primary science

— is the only certain safeguard against children's failure, the only

certain guarantee of children's progress and development.'
The case studies provide examples of what this looks like in
practice and how such a focus on children's learning can be an
intrinsic part of science teaching in primary classrooms. It is no
coincidence that Esmé Glauert (the teacher of Rabbit's House)
has just published a book herself to help teachers track children's
significant achievement in science (Glauert 1996).

Creativity

I suspect that it is the focus on learning that is the main driving

force behind the creativity. In striving to ensure that every child
learns and makes connections with the essential elements of sci-
ence, these teachers have created a wide range of strategies and
activities for their classrooms.
They have learnt ways of talking about science appropriately
with children of different ages; and more importantly they have
been able to get the children themselves talking seriously about
science. They have a'so been able to provide sufficiently tight frame-
works in terms of resources, classroom organization and time man-
agement, that they have been free to be creative.
They have written and resourced their draft 'plays' in their plans,
but the final performance is always different, because teaching
provides both the opportunity and the necessity to be creative.
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and Weather
Russell, T., Longdean, K. and McGuigan, L. (1991) Materials
Russell, T. and Watt, D. (1990a) Evaporation and Condensation
Russell, T. and Watt, D. (1990b) Growth
Watt, D. and Russell, T. (1990) Sound

Science Teacher Action Research [STARI Project 'Assessing Science in

the Primary Classroom' series. London: Paul Chapman.
Cavendish, S., Galton, M., Hargreaves, L. and Harlen, W. (1990) Observ-
ing Activities
Russell, T. and Harlen, W. (1990) Practical Tasks
Schilling, M., Hargreaves, L., Harlen, W. and Russell, T. (1990) Written
Tasks
 Index

Aardema, V., 70 paddle, 139

APU, 27, 31, 177 sail, 128, 143
appraisal, 8 body
Aquatech project, 7, 124 human, 83—6, 174
arm reach, 92—4 inside, 90—1
Aristotle, 15 books
assessment, 5, 60—4, 70 class, 77—8
checklist, 54—6 reference, 45, 87, 107, 125, 135,
formative, 53—6, 144 142
of processes, 27—8 story 70
see also elicitation Bournes, Claudette, 7
brain, 101
Baird, J., 101 brainstorming, 38, 85—6
Baird, M., 101 breathing, 99
Bexleyheath, 105, 111 Britain, 107
Black, P., 27 'busy body' (song), 83, 103
blind man's buff, 157
boats, 136 Carré, C., 4
electrically driven, 141 Carter, D., 4
188 Index

chalk, 105, 111, 115—16, 117 Driver, R., 19

chalk marl, 105, 115 Drummond, M., 181
charts, 150
see also table earth, 15, 19—22
cheating, 157 egocentric view, 20
Children's Ideas in Science, 19 geocentric view, 20
class books, see books earth's crust, 112
classification, 49, 56 earthworms, 51—3, 178
see also questions egg, 25, 57, 134
CLIS, 18, 19—22 elicitation, 29, 85—6, 90—1
close observation drawing, see Elstgeest, J., 26
observation engineers, 110
colour matching, 96 English as a second language,
compasses, 107 124, 147
concept, 13, 19, 173 English Channel, 11
concept map, 54, 56 environmental area, see school
condensation, 25 grounds
continents, 112 Epping Forest, 37, 53
conversations, 8, 22, 151, 155—7, ethical issues, 15—16
163—4 Eurotunnel, 105
see also discussions evaluation, 77, 144
creativity 5, 9, 182 evaporation, 25
cubic metre, 116 everyday relevance, 14, 18, 172,
cultural significance of science, 179
15, 18, 179 evidence, 72, 172
experiments, 13, 26, 172, 176
darkness, 162 eye, 147
data, 6, 27 colour, 150
base, 46—8 shape, 148
collection, 94, 149 structure, 149
interpreting, 13, 26, 69, 79, 91,
177—8 factors, see variables
pattern in, 75, 79 fair test, 139
probes, 29, 93 Feasey, R., 26, 29, 45
recording, 68, 74—7, 85 fish, 125, 174
decay, 58 fins, 128, 132
DPE, 10, 17 gills, 133
differentiation, 36, 45 gold-, 87, 133
discussions, 45, 50, 71, 75, 111, scales, 128
125, 132, 139 tails, 128
displays, 50, 82, 83, 88, 109 floating and sinking, 136
diversity see living things flow, water, 137
drawings, 69, 148 Folkestone, 105, 109
see also close observation food chain, 58
 Index 189

formal education, 17 integrated topic, 10, 107

Foulds, K., 29 interventions, 24, 151
frames see also SPACE
engagement, 29—30 invertebrates, 49, 57
engineering, 29—30 investigations, 27, 29, 48, 51—2,
modelling, 29—30 68—9, 84, 115—16, 155—60
scientific, 29—30 checklist, 55
France, 7, 110, 120 conceptual understanding, 27
Frost, J., 140 effect of context, 27
planning, 73
Gallas, K., 180 teacher's role, 176
gerbil, 87 see also data; evaluation;
geography, 125 observation; table
geology, 112, 115
Glauert, Esmé, 6, 182 Jelly, 5., 26
goals of science education, 11 jigsaw (of teaching), 35—7, 58
Goldsworthy, A., 29 jigsawing, 142
grass(es), 41—2 joint(s), 96—7
Greenwich journey time, 117
London Borough of, 7
Maritime Museum, 125
Grimwade, K., 112 Kinder, K., 4
groups 'knowing some science', 5, 171
by ability, 36 knowledge for teaching, 3—4
mixed ability, 45 knowledge, scientific, 56
group work, 77, 89 Krugger, C., 4
growth, 24—5, 99—102
gutter pipe, 7 landscape, 120
language learning, 101, 103, 125,
habitats, 57 139, 147, 153, 180
Hackney, 65 learning
hair, 84—5 formal, 16
hamster, 87 informal, 17
hand span, 94—5 letters, 52, 117, 135
Harland, J., 4 life cycles, 49, 56
Harlen, W., 4, 26, 28, 29 light, 24, 104, 161, 166
heart, 97—9 Little Red Riding Hood, 101
heart beat, 98—9 listening, 79
history, 125 living things, 86
hypothesis, 28, 154 characteristics, 57
57
Ice Age, 112 needs, 57, 83, 86
ID cards, 94 Lundie, Alex, 7
informal learning, 18 lungs, 99
190 Index

Mallett, M., 180 prawn, 132—4

management prediction, 74
resources, 7, 103 primary schools (England &
time, 5, 6, 72 Wales), 9
maps, 111, 125, 127, 137 problem solving, 86—8
geological, 115 procedural knowledge, 29
Marcus Mole, 117 process skifis, 27—8
Metcalf, Nicola, 8 professional development, 4
Millar, R., 29 Professor Question, 5, 43—4, 175
minibeasts, 46—7, 48, 57 Professor Sense, 5, 38—9, 46, 50
mirror, 23 pulse, 98
moles, 117 pump, 138
pupil (eye), 162—3
National Curriculum, 9, 10, 17
natural world, 12, 172 questions, 13, 174—6
nature of science, 14, 18, 179 children's, 26, 38, 41, 43, 46,
Neate, B., 180 51, 171
Newton, 15 classifying, 45
Nussbaum, G., 20 productive, 26
scientific, 25
objectives, 37 teachers', 50, 107—8, 128, 137,
observation, 132 143, 151, 172, 175
checklist, 54 see also investigations;
close, 46, 48, 128, 130, 149 Professor Question
OFSTED, 4 questionnaire, 118—19
Ollerenshaw, C., 26
organization, 5, 80, 89, 143 rabies, 118
orienteering, 111 reading, see books
Osborne, J., 30 recording, 73
research in science education, 5,
PACKS, 18, 29, 176 30—1
paddling pool, 7 resources, 7, 18, 103, 125
Pangaea (island), 109 reviewing learning, 78, 143
park, 39 Ritchie, R., 26
parrot, 87 Robertson, Anne, 5, 35
park designs, 42, 46 rocks, 107, 112, 115, 174
pattern, see data role model, 78, 143
pedagogic content knowledge, 8 role play, 7, 412
pets, 86—90 Russel, T., 29
planning, 4, 9, 60—4, 106, 124—7
planning charts, 126 Sangatte, 111
plates (continental), 112 school grounds, 51, 58, 59
play (as metaphor for teaching), scientific terminology, see
4—5 vocabulary
 Index 191

scientist, Pine class, 81—2 sequence, 37, 72, 109—10, 129

secondary sources, 85 stages, 37
seeing, 147, 161 technical know-how, 14, 143, 178
senses, 39, 101 technology, 125
sequences, see teaching Thames Water Authority, 128,
Shulman, L., 8 135
skeleton, 83—4, 96 Thomas, 26, 45
skin, 96 time, see management
spaceship earth, 15 time scales, 107
snow, 7 Tolstoy, L., 168
solar system, 22 topic plans, 106
sources of light, 7, 161, 166 torch, 23
SPACE, 18, 22—4, 30 tunnel boring, machine, 7, 118
speech therapist, 50 tunnel construction, 112—14
spoil (from tunnel), 7, 107, 111, tunnel exhibition, 116—17
116
STAR, 27, 30 values, 107
story, Masai, 70 variables (factors), 84, 151
see also Professor Question; vertebrate, 49
Professor Sense visits, 7, 38—9, 108—9, 120,
streamlining, 128, 136 vocabulary, 18, 50, 133, 142, 147
Summers, M., 4 voices, 71—2
support teacher, 147
War and Peace, 168
table, 66, 68, 74—6, 85 water, 115, 132, 136, 138—9,
tape recorder, 39, 50 whole class teaching, 75, 77,90, 128
TBM, see tunnel boring machine woodlouse, 48
teaching Wragg, E., 4, 9
as a jigsaw, 36 writing, 67, 120, 121—2, 131—3
plans, see planning
as a play, 4—5 yatch, 7, 142
EARLY EXPLORATIONS IN SCIENCE
Jane Johnston

The introduction of the National Curriculum in science at Key Stage 1

has highlighted the need for a close look at teaching and learning in early
years science. Children are immersed in science through their everyday
experiences and these early science experiences will shape their future
development.
This book explores issues such as the range, nature and importance of
pre-school and Key Stage 1 science experiences. It considers the devel-
opment of scientific skills, conceptual understanding and attitudes in
young children, through observation, exploration and creative activities.
Throughout there is an attempt to engage the reader in thoughtful consid-
eration of their role in early scientific development and of the important
role played by parents and children themselves. The book will be invalu-
able reading for all trainee and practising primary school teachers.
This book:
• provides several examples of stimulating and creative classroom
activities;
• is accessibly written to support teachers and build confidence in teach-
ing primary science;
• is firmly grounded in good early years practice.

Contents
Pre-school science experiences — The importance of exploration in the develop-
ment of early years science knowledge and skills — Seeking creativity in science
activities — Developing positive attitudes in science — Developing the teacher's
role — References — Index.

l84pp 0 335 19540 7 (Paperback) 0 335 19541 5 (Hardback)

DIFFERENTIATED PRIMARY SCIENCE
Anne Qualter

• What is differentiation?
• How can it be put into practice in primary science lessons?
• Is it really possible to provide differentiated learning activities for a
class of thirty or more primary children?
Taking a refreshingly pragmatic approach, Anne Qualter addresses these
challenging issues in this book. Drawing on her own experience as a
classroom teacher combined with research undertaken in a wide range
of primary classrooms, the author shows that genuinely differentiated
primary science is achievable. Using several classroom examples, she
argues that differentiation is not simply about categorizing children as
more or less able but involves the teacher in complex decisions which
take account of the child's understanding and capabilities, their cultural
background, gender, linguistic capabilities, interests and a variety of
other factors.
The book will be invaluable reading for both trainee and practising
primary school teachers.

Contents
The place of differentiation in primary science — What do we mean by ability
in science? — Finding starting points — Factors influencing children's science
— Developing models for differentiated learning — The process of differentiation

— Bibliography — Index.

2O8pp 0 335 19575 X (Paperback) 0 335 19576 8 (Hardback)

ORGANIZING FOR LEARNING IN THE PRIMARY
A BALANCED APPROACH TO CLASSROOM MANAGEMENT
Janet R. Moyles

What is it that underlies dassroom organization, routines, rules, structures

and daily occurrences? What are the prime objectives and what influences
the decisions of teachers and children? What is it useful for teachers to
consider when contemplating the issues of classroom management and
organization? What do different practices have to offer?
Organizing for Learning in the Primary Classroom explores the whole range
of influences and values which underpin why teachers do what they do
in the classroom context and what these mean to children and others.
Janet Moyles examines teaching and learning styles, children's inde-
pendence and autonomy, coping with children's differences, the physical
classroom context and resources, time management and ways of involv-
ing others in the day-to-day organization. Practical suggestions are given
for considering both the functional and aesthetic aspects of the classroom
context. Opportunities are provided for teachers to reflect on their own
organization and also consider innovative and flexible ways forward to
deal with new and ever increasing demands on their time and sanity!
This book is to be highly recommended for all primary school
teachers.. . (Management in Education)

indispensable to courses in initial teacher education and to

providers of inset. (Child Education)
Janet Moyles brings her long experience of the primary school to
Organizing for Learning in the Primary Classroom. . I particularly like
.

the attention she gives to the physical environment, giving lots of

advice about arrangements of furniture and the role of the teacher's
desk... (Times Educational Supplement)
Contents
Introduction: Polarizations and balance — Teachers and teaching: beliefs and
values — The learning environment: organizing the classroom context — The chil-
dren and their learning needs: balancing individual and whole class approaches
— Grouping children for teaching and learning: providing equal opportunities

and promoting appropriate behaviour — Time for teaching and learning — De-
ploying adult help effectively in the classroom: delegation and responsibility —
Evaluating classroom organization and management — Conclusion: the primary
classroom, a place and a time — References — Index.

2O8pp 0 335 15659 2 (Paperback) 0 335 15660 6 (Hardback)