Science at CFS

Intent:
Our aim is for children and staff to be engaged by practical hands-on work and investigations. Children are encouraged to recognise that science is all around them and in the natural world. We maximise the use of our outdoor space where children are encouraged to be independent, ask questions and learn alongside each other. We have high expectations that the children will use the correct scientific vocabulary to support their learning.
 

A Charford Scientist will:
•    be excited and curious
•    acquire good scientific knowledge  
•    understand scientific enquiry can help them to find out
•    question, explain, predict and analyse
•    observe, collect and present data
•    identify  
•    pattern seek  
•    classify and group
•    carry out a fair testing  
•    research  

Implementation:
The National Curriculum provides a structure and skills progression for the Science curriculum taught throughout school, which is linked, where possible, to the theme. We teach weekly Science lessons in both Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2 in order for the children to develop a positive attitude to Science and for them to embed key concepts and skills.
Our Science curriculum adopts an enquiry approach whereby the children are asked what they already know about the relevant Science topic. We aim to foster an understanding of scientific enquiry by encouraging the children to then think about what they would like to find out, and the best way to achieve this.

Our approach uses floor-books as a portfolios to capture class discussion in order to ensure progression in Working Scientifically skills across year groups. Children work in exercise books to record their understanding and progression in specific content knowledge.
We believe that children learn best through practical experiences. We aim to provide as many hands-on, practical experiences as possible to develop curiosity, and to enable the children to make connections with real-life contexts.

We foster curiosity of the natural world by making use of our extensive grounds.

With the identified needs of our children in mind, we aim to embed and develop the use of topic specific vocabulary by gathering and displaying relevant vocabulary on our Science working wall.   Each class’s working wall also displays the learning journey for the particular topic.

Programme of Study and Long-Term Plan

Useful Websites:
BBC KS1  - Activities and video clips
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/z6svr82

BBC – KS2 - Activities and video clips
https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/subjects/z2pfb9q

Science Sparks – Some easy to perform at home science experiments
https://www.science-sparks.com/

WOW Science – Games, App and videos.
https://wowscience.co.uk/

Science Bob – experiments and video demonstrations
https://sciencebob.com/