SCIENCE

Science at St. Alban's

Intent

At St Alban’s we aim to give children a strong conceptual understanding of the world around them, whilst acquiring specific skills and knowledge to encourage them to think scientifically. Scientific enquiry skills are embedded across each topic within the content of biology, chemistry and physics, focusing on key features, so that pupils learn a variety of approaches in order to answer relevant questions. Topics are revisited and developed throughout child’s time at St Albans to aid progression and develop a secure understanding. We aim to encourage children to develop a love and curiosity for Science so that they are able to understand the uses and implication of science, today and for the future.

Implementation

Based on the Rising Stars Science scheme, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school. Topics are revisited and developed in depth throughout children’s time at St Alban's. Science is taught weekly, focusing on knowledge and skills stated in the National Curriculum. All children are encouraged to develop and use a range of skills, including observations, planning, data analysis and investigations, as well as being encouraged to think critically and question the world around them. Our Science curriculum provides children with high quality learning opportunities, not just inside the classroom, but also through the use of outdoor learning, school trips and a focused Science week.

Impact

As a result of a rich and progression curriculum, children acquire a variety of scientific skills and knowledge based upon scientific enquiry. The impact and measure of this, is to ensure children not only acquire the age appropriate knowledge, but also to develop skills which equip them to progress within their everyday lives. Specialist scientific vocabulary is taught and build up which enables pupils to articulate their understanding of taught concepts. The successful approach at St Alban’s results in a fun, engaging high-quality science education, that provides children with the foundations and knowledge for understanding the world through first hand experiences.

Curriculum Overview

The Progression Framework for Science is divided into two parts: Progression in Concepts and Working Scientifically:

Progression in concepts is based on the statements relating to key ideas in the Science National Curriculum. It is split into Biology, Chemistry and Physics; within each of these a number of ‘big ideas’ have been identified and used to show how later statements progress from earlier ones. Working Scientifically is based on the main skill areas which are viewed as processes (e.g. planning investigations, reporting findings). Each of these is then subdivided into individual skills.

Below is our Curriculum Overview showing how we develop progression of concepts and skills through the year groups. These units, concepts and scientific skills are implemented from the planning and progression documents from Rising Stars - 'Switched On Science' Curriculum.

Science Week

For the past two years, the children have enjoyed being involved in a whole school Science Week. They have participated in lots of fun activities developing their scientific curiosity, knowledge and skills. As part of Science Week in 2023, we entered the national competition 'If you were an engineer, what would you do?' This amazing initiative, encouraged the children to discover what it means to be an engineer, look at examples of historic and famous engineers and then designed their own invention to be entered into the competition. As part of the week, we also welcomed Megan into school, who is a software engineer and works for Thales. She shared with us how she loves her job because she gets to do lots of problem solving and working in a team. Megan builds sonar systems for submarines. She presented informative assemblies to the children inspiring our future engineers.

We are very proud to share that we had a number of national winners from our school who attended the awards ceremony at Edge Hill University. Congratulations, Jack, Albie, Adam, Naomi, Amara and Archie for your brilliant ideas and well-presented designs. A very special congratulations to Jack who was chosen by the judges as the over all winner of the night!