Their story, in their words…
Thanks to the Mark Evison Foundation, we were fortunate enough to receive a grant to create a science club for KS2 students at our own Primary School, as we had joined a similar club when we were in Year 4 and found it to advance our love for science, and this passion for science has since motivated many of us to pursue science related A-levels. We decided to start this club as a way of providing a hands-on, interactive experience for students, with engaging lesson plans and interactive discussions to make sure the club didn’t just feel like an extra lesson of the day.
Many students who attended said that they felt that science was much more fun than they thought, and we believe that we allowed the students to openly experiment and try new things to see what they could discover – strengthening their curiosity and wonder.
In our sessions, we provided a demonstration, explained and discussed the scientific reasoning in a way they understood (and could later explain back to us), and allowed them to try each experiment independently. Across our 5 sessions, we looked at:
- Density, explained by making and decorating lava lamps out of oil and water
- Properties of states of matter – Making and experimenting with oobleck.
- Freezing and Solidifying – making ice cream in a bag using cream, vanilla extract and ice with salt.
- Gravity and overcoming obstacles – using teamwork for the egg drop test
- Construction and engineering – using spaghetti and marshmallows to effectively build towers that met provided criteria
Through these sessions, the students were engaged throughout and asked questions, exactly what we wanted to encourage. As a group, our priority was to make sure each student felt confident enough to ask questions when they may have been confused, explain newly learned concepts with ease, and help each other – which we clearly saw during team tasks such as the tower building one.
As a group, we are all grateful for the opportunity provided by the Mark Evison foundation to create this club, as it allowed us to not only gain experience in a field some of us are aspiring to, it also allowed us to give back to the community that once gave us the inspiration and confidence to pursue science, an experience that we still value to this day, and hope we have given back to the next generation of young scientists.
