Making Better Sense of Ancient Resources

I'm busy working with a lovely school in the Wairoa region and we're just starting our journey exploring the science capabilities. If your school is thinking of revisiting science as a PLD area, even if you're doing this internally without a lovely science facilitator, I really do recommend beginning with the TKI website and focusing on building understanding around these capabilities.
Anyway, the preplanned (and levelled!) lessons on the TKI science online website do use those older Ministry science resources but change the focus a little. I was busy scanning the recipes for the slimes and oozes lesson and was struck again by this gold sitting in our resource rooms!
The big issue is that balancing act between the thrust of the 90's curriculum's focus on children will learn stuff and our current curriculum's focus of children will explore how the natural physical world and science itself work. Both bits are important -we can't explore how to gather and interpret data, plan an investigation, and share results without students knowing more and more at each level of their science development. For children to know how the natural physical world 'works', they need to know some of that 'stuff'! I do worry that teachers may either go all out on knowing stuff or stay well away from asking any questions that may reflect whether students do know stuff!

Making Better Sense of the Material World

I've just taken a photo of the Assessment Outcomes for the lesson from the Making Better Sense lesson and wanted to show how these could reflect the science capabilities. There's a bit here that talks about listing physical properties --> this could fit very nicely into gather and interpret data with students working with the teacher to decide the success criteria -how do we list/find these properties? How many senses will we use? Another assessment outcome is about design, draw and label and that could reflect the interpret representations capability. Other outcomes here talk about investigating, describing and discovering which could also reflect a pedagogy about the nature of science.
With all the above examples, students will need some content knowledge as they develop ideas! I know that many teachers are focusing on the students need to know about magnets... but if I have that as my focus, I'm back to children learning stuff! Instead, I might think about assessing how students use their knowledge to develop the science capabilities. My teaching focus will be how diagrams are drawn or investigations are carried out. I might talk about repeated testing, recording results/data carefully, asking good questions to investigate, and how we share our results. If children understand how science works, then their results will be deeper as well as them knowing more 'stuff' which can often end up with more questions being asked!
The other side of this coin is that I will be using scientific vocabulary, science concepts and 'knowledge' to make sense of data. We can't throw out all the 'students learning stuff' but it does need to be within the context of actually we're all about children understanding how science works through rich science themes.
So, have another look at those old Building Science Concepts or Making Better Sense resources. Photocopy the assessment pages and then discuss how the capabilities could be more deliberately focused on along with what teachers may expect from students. Talk about the balance between the natural physical world and science itself explorations -what would happen if we only did 'knowledge'? What about if we only did 'science itself'? How could either of these questions impact the future for students (as that is the capabilities focus)?

Anyway, that's all for now! Keep sciencing.
Paul