Intent

The National Curriculum for Science aims to ensure that all pupils:

• Develop scientific knowledge and conceptual understanding through the specific disciplines of biology, chemistry and physics.
• Develop understanding of the nature, processes and methods of science through different types of scientific enquiries that help them to answer scientific questions about the world around them.
• Are equipped with the scientific knowledge required to understand the uses and implications of science, today and for the future.

At Godolphin Junior Academy, these skills are embedded and developed consistently, through well sequenced and progressive Science lessons. Pupils are taught to work scientifically by asking relevant questions to seek information from multiple sources and to rely on scientific enquires to determine answers. This process provides a solid foundation for them to form independent opinions and make decisions, a skill that will serve them well throughout all facets of their life and academic pursuits. 

Science lessons at Godolphin Junior Academy facilitates opportunities for pupils to develop their understanding of scientific knowledge, its relevance to their lives and its capacity to apply these vital life-skills to everyday activities. These skills help the children to generate ideas, make observations, collect and record scientific data and use evidence to understand key issues across the curriculum.

Implementation

At Godolphin Junior Academy, Science lessons are of a high quality, designed to ignite children’s zest for knowledge and encourage pupils’ curiosity for the world around them.

Teachers create a positive learning environment and motivate all children to achieve their full potential in weekly, high quality Science lessons.

Our teachers apply the following approach to all Science lessons in order to have successful implementation:

• Teachers reinforce an expectation that all children are capable of achieving high standards in Science regardless of starting points.
• High quality Science resources (such as TigTag) and models are used to embed the understanding and application of scientific concepts.
• Scientific vocabulary is essential to pupils’ understanding of topics. In each lesson teachers provide good models of vocabulary, which pupils are encouraged to use in their verbal and written explanations.  
• Deeper layers of questioning (using solo taxonomy) is used by teachers to assess children’s understanding and extend their knowledge of scientific concepts.

Science is taught through progressive units, each introducing a scientific concept which is built upon as they progress through the school. At the beginning of each topic, Science Unit pages outline key objectives which support pupils to understand their progress throughout the topic. This is followed by a 'knowledge seeker' process which helps teachers to assess pupils’ prior knowledge and encourage pupils’ enquiry skills. Children are encouraged to generate questions regarding their new science topic to open up areas to explore, investigate and learn about. 

Throughout Science lessons, teachers promote scientific vocabulary and enable pupils to gain a deep understanding of new scientific vocabulary. All pupils are encouraged to hypothesize, plan and conduct fair experiments. Every topic has an experiment for the students to conduct and report on. Teachers provide good models for pupils to understand the process and purpose of fair tests and collecting data.

Practical experiments and opportunities to learn from the outdoors are planned to allow pupils to explore science phenomena. Through skillful teacher questioning, pupils draw scientific conclusions from their experiments and evidence they have collected. Children’s knowledge of key concepts and vocabulary is consistently assessed through mini quizzes. To celebrate their achievements, pupils self-reflect on their work by referring back to their knowledge seeker questions and explain what skills and knowledge they have gained. Pupils showcase this learning through an extended piece of writing at the end of each unit.

Impact

Pupils at Godolphin become confident scientists who can share  their understanding of a wide range of scientific ideas. Our pupils can articulate their knowledge, hold high quality discussions and ask challenging questions in their science lessons and as a result can recognise how scientific ideas can help them to understand and predict how the world operates. Our pupils are encouraged and taught to read like a scientist, think like a scientist and question like a scientist which results in pupils being able to use different types of scientific enquiry. Godolphin pupils are able to explain their conclusions articulately using a range of evidence and scientific knowledge to support their findings. 

We measure the impact of our science curriculum through:

Science assessments

Regular science quizzes

Outcomes of pupil work and projects

Knowledge seekers task that measure knowledge before and after a unit

Vocabulary tasks

Pupil voice 

British Science Week Celebrations 2021

We all know it can be challenging to educate youngsters in innovative ways that don’t run the risk of their minds wandering. Godolphin Junior Academy does this successfully and regularly by celebrating British Science Week on a yearly basis. Run by the British Science Association, British Science Week is a ten day celebration of science, technology, engineering and maths, featuring entertaining and engaging events and activities across the UK for people of all ages. The theme for this year was ‘Innovation for the Future’.

The purpose of the celebration is to engage children in different activities, to motivate, inspire and steer them towards future STEM occupations. This year, the celebration took place on the 22^nd of March, 2021, with a great sense of enthusiasm and curiosity witnessed across year groups. The most exciting day started with an assembly run by the Science Team, including our curious science explorers who shared insights into the life changing inventions that had been made by the great scientists in the past.

This was then followed by a range of project work spread across all year groups. The children made inventions which they felt would be useful and benefit the world in the future. As part of this work, they designed their inventions, created them and then evaluated their work.

For Year 3, this presented itself as quite fascinating and fun-filled learning, as it was their first experience of project work that related to the celebration of British Science Week, and this injected a sense of creativity and inquisitiveness in them. Highlights for their year group included inventions relating to fashion and design, and engineering.

Year 4 explored what a future classroom might look like and require, created new ways in art and experimented with colours to create the ‘strongest colour’. They even explored how Coronavirus infects people and possibly ways of creating herd immunity.

Year 5 discovered more about the world of wearable tech and how it can improve lives.

Year 6 investigated light and studied it on an atomic level, with their very own spectroscopes. They also thought about how to keep both their body and the planet healthy, ultimately saving the environment in the long term. Some of them designed robots inspired by insects to help solve challenges and those that could even be repurposed for space exploration.

The enthusiasm and confidence in learning was evident in our ‘Ocean’ children. They were engaged in exploring light, shadows and materials.

All in all, it was highly evident by all the students’ experiences across all year groups that the celebration of British Science Week this year was a thorough success. Everyone learnt some valuable lessons to take forward with them for their long term learning and personal development, and everyone at Godolphin looks forward to hopefully celebrating next year in person, involving everyone’s families as well.