For next term...

I've been thinking about next term a bit this week, thinking about science (strangely enough) and some ideas for what I could do in the classroom. My wrestling is that I still have the old me teaching science so thinking of topics, whilst the new me is trying to keep the focus on the science capabilities or the nature of science.

https://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/hall-of-fame/

Instead of saying "We're doing planets", or butterflies, or chemical change, which in itself causes kids to say "Oh we've done planets with Miss..." with the idea that they now know all there is to know about planets (hands up who've had that happen in class!), perhaps we could be more specific about what we're exploring. I'd also like us to think more about which capability or particular bit of exploring how science itself works that we'll be doing in class.
This might mean my introduction to our next science unit, rather than being "We're doing plants", could be "I want to focus on how we observe closely and then explain our thinking by doing some science, around the topic of plants -looking at seeds, how plants germinate and how we could help them to grow faster." Straight away I can see the 'science itself' bits as well as know that this is going to be different to when I grew broadbeans in Mr A's class back in Year 3!
When I'm picking topics, I'm also thinking about what the children would like to do. We want to have science being authentic and relevant to them. Sometimes I do think that, although children haven't been speaking of the wonders of magnetic forces, I know they'd enjoy the experiences and could get a lot of critical thinking and discussion from my questions about magnets so I might run with that. When I'm modelling in classes, children will say things that make me think that could be a topic for another time. For example, students at a senior level struggling to describe texture or smells, or a student thinking that the sugar cube has melted, or in a junior room, children arguing with me that my lovely little jellyfish isn't real -it is real, it's just not alive!

I often suggest to teachers to make a note of these ideas to revisit later. And talking about revisiting, why not have a couple of lessons to revise what you have explored earlier in the year. Do children still remember? Are they using the vocab you introduced? Have their misconceptions gone or have they popped back?
The other bit that I've been thinking about is What do I really want the students to get out of this? Those who have had me invade their schools, classrooms and minds, know that I do like the idea of kids learning 'stuff' but I'm not really bothered by how much stuff or what that stuff might be. I've been rereading a publication Anne reminded me of about the Big Ideas of science.  It's a great read, with some ideas about progressions, unpacking their Big Ideas and it's easy to read. Here's one link: http://thescienceteacher.co.uk/big-ideas/. I'm not saying we should all be running after this but it does remind me that our own NZC has some ideas about each of the strands.
So I've decided I want to look at insects and their behaviours. We get little ant invasions regularly in the classroom and there are a few wasps around too. I'm going to use the Landcare website to look at invasive insects, I might get the kids to think about ways we can eradicate the wasp populations (and yes, I know it will result in the death of many wasps but I think that's a good thing and the children will learn about investigating, gathering data, interpreting their results and sharing information) and I might have a play with some ideas I've had about whether insects prefer different colours as I've seen some research about bees liking particular colours (carried out by primary school children and published) and ants preferring lighter colours.

I won't be assessing whether they know insects have three body parts although we will be sketching insects, learning about their body parts and life cycles. I will be assessing how children investigate, how careful students are with their research and how they use their data to prove their thinking. I might try to provide students with some reading to go along with my unit as well as some chances to be exposed to scientists or 'entomologists' at work in the field (if you'll excuse the pun). I'll definitely get some stats in too with children's data.
With my insects unit, I'm using the Living World as my context strand. There might be a wee bit of other strands like Material World if I'm making wasp poisons but LW will be my main focus. I've read the NZC p.28 which has a paragraph on the Living World:

New Zealand Curriculum, p. 28

It's kind of like an essence statement so there might be some big ideas here for me. I also know this is a paragraph that covers from Y1 to Y12 so I don't need to do everything here! It says the emphasis is on New Zealand's biology so I think I'll look at some native ants and other insects and perhaps how invasive species have impacted them. A key word is "sustainability" so perhaps that could be a bit of a focus too -how can we help the NZ praying mantis rather than letting that South African bully slowly wipe it out (an entertaining article about this: http://www.forestandbird.org.nz/what-we-do/publications/forest-bird-magazine-article/springbok-invasion)?
So where will I find these lovely units preplanned for me? Nowhere! You know your children, what science capabilities they need to further develop, what they're particularly interested in and what levels they are operating at in terms of science and literacy. I do get asked a lot for lessons with everything in them and yes, I could write them but they're not my class! There are lots of resources out there that I use quite happily, both printed and online but the trick is to adapt them.
No lessons overseas will focus on our NZ science capabilities although they might have a nature of science centre. To be honest, I  don't find many experiments that do have this. We have great printed resources with our Making Better Sense series and the Building Science Concepts that have their own version of Big Ideas for students and are levelled for kiwi kids as well as full of good activities. But they also aren't science capabilities based! They can sort of link up with the Nature of Science and if I check the process skills bits with each lesson and make that my focus, I can create some great lessons on insects, weather, plants, magnets, etc! The focus of the BSCs tends to be teacher-driven and "children, understand this content idea", but they just need a bit of tweaking. I've done this with a few of the BSCs and think they can work quite well.
"Well Paul, that sounds marvellous but I have a lot of other work to do and just don't have the time" is probably how a lot of you are responding but if you want to really understand the nature of science, you need to do the planning and thinking! Plan the unit with a group of teachers -they might not be in your school but across your Community of Learning... imagine if all the Y5/6 teachers got together for an afternoon and planned collaboratively?!? Or imagine if you grabbed a teacher of a level below your class and one teacher above and then planned a progressive unit thinking about what children at the different levels could learn and how each next class could build on that knowledge of how the natural physical world and science itself works. Which then leads me to thinking about what if children enjoyed the chance to revisit science topics, to get a little deeper into that topic, that they had the chance to apply what they had already learnt?
Well, I hope this has given you some ideas for the next term. As always I still really like incidental science so it may be that I won't have a particular topic per se, but will pick up little bits here and there as the children / whanau / me / tv / etc! discover it.

keep on sciencing
Paul