Science

“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existence.” – Albert Einstein

Our Science subject leader is Mr Gregory.

Intent

St Joseph’s Primary School understands the need for all pupils to develop their scientific ability and increase science capital. A good understanding of scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding helps to support pupils work across the curriculum. We believe that a high quality science education provides the foundations for understanding the world through the specific disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics. Science plays a huge role in everyday life and a good understanding holds opportunities for the future. All pupils should be taught essential aspects of the knowledge, methods, processes and uses of science. Children should be encouraged to understand how science can be used to explain what is occurring, predict how things will behave, and analyse causes as well as offering rational explanations to events and findings.

Science in our school is about developing children’s ideas and ways of working that enable them to make sense of the world in which they live through investigation, as well as using and applying process skills. This is achieved by exposing the children to high quality teaching and learning experiences, which allow children to explore their outdoor environment and locality, thus developing their scientific enquiry and investigative skills. They are immersed in scientific vocabulary, which aids children’s knowledge and understanding not only of the topic they are studying, but of the world around them.

Implementation

In ensuring high standards of teaching and learning in science, we implement a curriculum that is progressive throughout the whole school.

Planning for science is a process in which all teachers are involved to ensure that the school gives full coverage of, ‘The National Curriculum programmes of study for Science 2014’ and, ‘Understanding of the World’ in the Early Years Foundation Stage. As we have mixed age classes, we ensure full coverage by working off Year A/Year B models. Science teaching at St Joseph’s is taught as discrete units and lessons and we commit around 2 hours per week to its teach in in each class. Where relevant, we link science to topic work and other areas of the curriculum.

We ensure that all children are provided with rich learning experiences that aim to:

Prepare our children for life in an increasingly scientific and technological world today and in the future.
Help our children acquire a growing understanding of the nature, processes and methods of scientific ideas.
Help develop and extend our children’s scientific concept of their world.
Build on our children’s natural curiosity and developing a scientific approach to problems.
Encouraging open-mindedness, self-assessment, perseverance and developing the skills of investigation – including: observing, measuring, predicting, hypothesising, experimenting, communicating, interpreting, explaining and evaluating.
Develop the use of scientific language, recording and techniques.
Develop the use of computing in investigating and recording.
Make links between science and other subjects.

Impact

The impact, and measure of this, is to ensure children not only acquire the appropriate age related knowledge linked to the science curriculum, but also skills which equip them to progress from their starting points, and within their everyday lives.

All children will have:

A wider variety of skills linked to both scientific knowledge and understanding, and scientific enquiry/investigative skills.
A richer vocabulary which will enable to articulate their understanding of taught concepts.
An increased science capital which encourages children to have high aspirations, which will see them through to further study, work and a successful adult life.

Due to having mixed-age classes, the objectives for science are taught over a two year rolling programme