Science Week

Kia ora koutou!
A really brief post today as I'm mad busy and about to rush off for a week down in Wairoa and Mahia. And once again Rocket Lab launches a rocket the week I'm down there and once again gets the day wrong... well played Rocket Lab, well played! The night launch last night certainly looked spectacular!

From stuff.co.nz

Anyway, next week is Science Week and the theme is "the Periodic Table". That's because of it being the 150th year of when the Periodic Table was created. It's a topic that I've really struggled to get excited about as students really come across this generally at Year 9 rather than at Primary School. I sort of have the same issues when I think about 'doing' stars or the Solar System... I'm just not sure how I can get the capabilities and nature of science into this...

That's my initial thinking but when I am challenged like this, I head straight back to the capabilities and the nature of science components to see how I could use the periodic table and there is a wee bit! For this blog I'm thinking more of the Year 7 and 8 students, although certainly year 5 and 6 children could have a play with these ideas. For juniors, some of the elements could be interesting to say -you know how they love big words (!), and the idea of all these elements making us up is quite fascinating to introduce at this level.

We don't tend to look at the science history aspect of the NOS strand, Understanding about Science, and this topic is a great one for this. Have a read up of Mendeleev and how he came up with the table. What did other scientists think? How did his work support others'? Because of the table, some scientists were able to find elements because of the spaces for elements that had not yet been found but Mendeleev was sure were there. This is a bit like finding the planet Neptune because the maths said it was there and when astronomers looked, it was!

Here at the IPL, the science team (Anne Barker, Stephen Ross and myself) have written blog posts and I've written a lesson for introducing the periodic table that you are most welcome to use. The link is: https://www.waikato.ac.nz/professionallearning/ and they'll be added this week. Other places to go is the Royal Society page and NZAPSE page. Of course, I have to add my colleagues up the hill here at the university, Science Learning Hub, who have collated ideas too!

If you're on my Facebook page (just search for science happening NZ), I'll post bits each day... hopefully!

Have a fantastic week! And next week too!

Keep sciencing on!