This month’s somewhat mouldy offering is written by Clare Docking who is
one of our advisory teachers in the East of England. |
In the news
I
had been looking forward to highlighting that 2020 was Florence Nightingale’s
200th birthday when doing this activity in school this year. However, the pandemic put an end to me doing
any work with children for the time being.
However, this is a great opportunity for you, if you are currently
working in school, to involve children in an exciting science activity while
making relevant cross-curricular links
with history and English. It also ties
in well to the current situation as children will have been hearing a lot about
microbes lately. This is also a chance to reinforce messages about hand washing
as this gives children direct evidence of some of the microbes in our
environment. Furthermore, you can use
this activity to allay children’s anxieties by encouraging discussion about
science helping us to overcome many health issues over time (such as the
discovery of antibiotics for example).
Let children know that scientists around the world are collaborating to
find a vaccine and treatment for Covid-19.
The information here is for teachers working with children
in the classroom. There is also support
for families trying the activity out at home in our free to download IndusTRY ATHOME activity sheet. We think the activity lends itself to being
done at home or in a socially distanced classroom, as the resources needed are
cheap and readily available so each child could have their own.
|
Let’s investigate!
Children love a challenge so start the
investigation by reading the news report from a fictional bio-tech company (provided
in the resource), and tell the children their help is needed to find out which
conditions are the best for growing mould.
Encourage them to draw on their own experiences when thinking about different
conditions – why do they think food left in a cupboard or lunchbox for too long
goes mouldy? Where do we usually
store food and why do they think this is? Is food kept warm or cold to preserve
it? At this point listen to the children’s ideas and see if they suggest that
moisture, temperature and light make a difference to growth. This is a good
opportunity to bring in previous learning about growth of other living
organisms such as plants which may prompt ideas.
I have not used this activity with younger children
but Jane Winter, in the CIEC team, asked Kathryn Horan (@SciKathryn) about her
experience of doing a similar activity with her EYFS class. Apparently they were fascinated when they
compared bread that they had touched without washing their hands and a fresh
piece of bread. They were able to make
sensible predictions based upon their experience, saying such things as ‘I
think that the dirty one will go black’.
We agreed that this would be an activity that would lend itself to being
used with a mixed age group in the current situation.
Kathryn Horan's (@SciKathryn) class were
fascinated to watch what happened to a slice of bread that they touched without
washing their hands first!
|
Top Tips
Here are some tips
to make your investigation a success:
- Spraying the bread with water will ensure that the moisture is evenly spread before it is sealed in the bag.
- Make sure the bread doesn’t contain preservatives or it may take much longer to get results.
- Very occasionally, the children find they don’t get the expected results from an investigation, especially if working with living things. Use this as a learning point to do further investigations and tell the children that scientists sometimes experience this as well, however, discoveries are often made from things not turning out as expected.
IMPORTANT Don’t
reopen the bag once the investigation has started. This is because potentially
harmful spores from the mould could be released into the air. Once the experiment is complete, enclose the
sealed bag in another sealed bag before disposing of it.
Full details of this activity can be found in our free resource and includes teachers’ notes, children’s activity sheets and national curriculum links. |
No comments:
Post a Comment