Monday, May 18, 2015

Exciting Science Activities for Early Years and Key Stage One

One of Nicky's KS1 activities

The Annual Primary Science Conference held at the National Science Learning Centre, York, is always a highlight in my academic diary. I have been there, without fail, for many years now both as a participant and as a presenter and I will be networking in both of these guises on Tuesday 30thJune this year. The session I have decided to offer as ‘Option F’ in a superb list of choices is one I have titled ‘Exciting Science Activities for Early Years and Key Stage One’. I chose to offer this because, as an experienced primary school teacher, I have taught children in Key Stage Two for the majority of my career, however, after having my own children, I seem to have experienced a personal epiphany in just how wonderful and rewarding planning and teaching science activities for the youngest children in school can be. I also believe that sessions for Early Years and Key Stage One teachers can often be under represented at conferences and events and I wanted to do something to attempt to redress the balance.

My workshop will be practical, whereby you can try out a range of carefully planned, tried and tested science activities either created for or adapted to suit children in Early Years and Key Stage One. I have put a real emphasis on the ‘tried and tested’ aspect of the session, as I believe it is of the utmost importance that every activity I bring ‘to the table’ has been actually been carried out by me, in the classroom with children of the relevant age range. In many of my recent experiences, I have learnt from mistakes, evaluated and adapted ideas that I thought or presumed would work but quite clearly required rethinking or improving. I have built up a bank of science lessons and activities that really do work, I am proud of the resulting product and I am looking forward to sharing these with you on the day.

By Nicola Waller, CIEC Advisory Teacher for the North East


Nicky at a recent CIEC event