The Elements - using creative skills to investigate scientific processes.
'The Elements' is an Enquiry Schools project delivered at Dovecot Primary School by Creative Partnerships Merseyside.
Enquiry Question
The Enquiry Question for this project was: what would be the impact of using creative skills to investigate scientific processes on pupils’ learning and their ability to make connections between science, other subjects and the wider world?
The project
The programme involved a Year 5 and a Year 6 class. The classes were already involved in a whole school project about ‘The Elements’ with Year 5 studying ‘Air’ and ‘Fire’, and Year 6 studying ‘Water’. The emphasis of the programme was on Science, and other curriculum areas fed into this, in particular Literacy.
In order to explore the creative processes involved in scientific enquiry, the practitioners began the programme by asking the young people to translate the scientific process (hypothesize, plan, predict, test, conclude) in order to communicate this to a younger audience. This enabled the young people to interpret the language of scientific enquiry in their own way and to communicate their learning to others in ways which were new to them. Through mime games, connection activities and excursion techniques the practitioners encouraged the young people to explore the relationship between cause and effect across different contexts, allowing them to build on their own experiences. Different learning styles were catered for, promoting the engagement of all pupils, including those who had not been expected to fully participate.
Imaginary situations were constructed and explored before the young people were given a practical scientific task. In this way they were able to relate scientific thinking to real and imagined experiences. The young people worked collaboratively to solve problems through scientific experiments and were able to demonstrate what they had discovered. They presented their experiments in a concrete way as oppose to their usual written method of recording their investigations.
In terms of learning for the school, the benefits of making cross-curricular links integral to science have been recognised. It was clear that using empathy to link the subject to the real world, by setting investigations in ‘real life’ or imaginary contexts which were personal to the young people, did result in the pupils being more involved, engaged and confident.