The name of the practical bit of science changed with the new curriculum in 2000. Scientific Enquiry is the new moniker, but this title simply legitimises many of the activities that have always been a part of teaching.
The new title confirmed that investigation - covering activities such as fair tests - was just one of the ways in which you can answer science questions. There are others, many of them ideally suited to the natural history side of science. This is good news to those of us who find it hard to think up a fair test we can apply to humans, other animals, or plants - especially if we find the idea of stripping a plant of leaves, for example, objectionable!
Here are some ideas for the foundation stage, and key stages 1 and 2. They involve skills we can call association, classification and exploration. The ideas for each level could be adapted for other age ranges, but they are alternative, legitimate ways of answering science questions.
Foundation-Associating
Young children are egotists - interested in themselves and their immediate surroundings. Teachers have used this knowledge to their advantage, especially when making simple comparisons between themselves and others.
This is the skill of association. It is making comparisons that show a general pattern. Who has the largest hands? Are they also the tallest? Who has the longest legs? Can they jump the farthest? Who is the smallest? Can they get inside the smallest hoop? All these questions associate two human characteristics and give you a general pattern. Yes, the tallest might have the largest hands. But there will be children who don't fit the pattern: a tall child with small hands, a short child whose hands are large.
Buy up end-of-line rolls of wallpaper, ask the children to lie on them and draw around each other. Then they draw round their hands, and finally you display the body outlines - and their related hands - on the floor in body size order or hand size order. Are children in the same place in each line? Unlikely! So children learn about our variety and uniqueness. You can emphasise that this is not a competition - being big or small is not an objective in itself. You can begin to put across the difficult idea that we change as we grow - the tallest now may not be the tallest later. (This is difficult, especially for children who are wondering why Grandad isn't taller than Dad since he is older.)
Has this an everyday application? Yes. News bulletins often carry examples of association - usually as medical discoveries. High birth weight has been associated with exceptional performance at school. Pregnant mums with large feet are likely to have easier births (large feet are associated with a large bone structure, wide hips and so an easy birth). But these are associations, not direct connections. There will always be exceptions that prove the rule. Small feet don't always mean a child will be delivered by a Caesarean section!
Key Stage 1 - Classifying
Anybody who has never sorted with infants will think that it is easy. Two hoops, a pile of objects, sort into steel and plastic? Easy! Sort into magnetic and non-magnetic? No problem! Into natural and artificial or "made"? No worries!
In practice, it's difficult. There are always in-betweens that won't quite fit in either category. One group of eight-year-olds sorted a pile of materials into several groups: completely natural (a rock, a straw), shaped (a piece of wood), changed (a china mug, a steel nail) and completely changed (a plastic pen, a nylon shirt). (For this last group I introduced the word "synthetic".)
If you are teaching about living things, try this. It's easy enough to teach, in principle, the characteristics of life - growth, movement, reproduction, feeding, producing waste, sensitivity to surroundings, death. But many inert objects possess some of the characteristics of life, especially fire. And some living things - a seed, a fertilised egg, a fresh apple or an onion - do not appear to demonstrate any of the characteristics of life at all. Yet they are alive. ("When," I ask children, "did the apple die?") So have a box containing an apple, an onion, a hen's egg, a real and an artificial flower, and illustrations of a fire, cloud and a river. Which is alive?
Is the apple alive or dead? Dead, of course - except for the seeds. The seeds could live, become trees and have little Cox's pippins of their own. So they have the potential for life. Fair enough. But is the apple alive? Not if it's rotting. Life has now ceased, and the natural processes of decay, helped by other living things such as bacteria and fungi, are reducing that apple to a nasty brown puddle. But what if the apple is fresh? Is it alive? If not, when did it die? Did it give a ghastly death rattle as you snapped it from the tree? No? Did it die later of wounds or shock? No?
Then it must still be alive, mustn't it? In fact it is still respiring - taking in oxygen to support its life processes and giving out carbon dioxide. (So is the onion.) And it is still responding to stimuli. It may ripen nicely after picking, especially if it is kept in the right sort of light. No wonder children have difficulty with the concept of living and non-living. So do we.
And how about Pharaoh's corn? Seeds from ancient Egypt, thousands of years old, have been taken from tombs of the pharaohs and germinated to produce new plants. Was that corn alive as a seed or not? No wonder that the egg - which similarly appears to be without life - has been taken on as the Easter symbol of rebirth.
Key Stage 2 - Exploring
We all know what Saturn looks like: a sphere surrounded by a disc of coloured rings. When Galileo saw it in 1610 he was hampered in two ways. First, the telescope he had devised, based on an idea he had heard the previous year, was crude and could not define the rings with any clarity. Second, he had not grown up with the idea that a planet could be anything but a ball floating in space. So, presented with the planet and its rings viewed obliquely, he concluded that it was three balls, like a pawnbroker's sign. It looked like a head with a pair of ears, or handles. It came as a shock, two years later, for him to find the ears had disappeared.
"I had discovered Saturn to be three-bodied... Now what can be said of this strange metamorphosis?... Has Saturn devoured his children?... I am restrained by my own inadequacy and fear of error," he wrote.
In reality, the rings, now edge-on to the Earth, had become invisible to Galileo. He concluded that he must have been wrong with his original observation. It was 46 years before the rings of Saturn were first noted by Christiaan Huygens, who had a better telescope.
This story illustrates the skills necessary for effective observation. Not just good eyesight and the right tools, but also a prepared mind that knows the kind of thing it is looking for. (But not over-prepared. Even the most experienced observer can be surprised.) When children make observations, using all their senses, they need teaching what to look for, and how to see it. Clear observation is an acquired skill. Without it, children can produce amazingly accurate illustrations of batteries while failing to record the wiring of their circuit. Older students using microscopes can miss the specimen but record every air bubble on a slide.
So, observation should be seen as a taught skill and, for many observational experiences, there can be more than one outcome: scientific, aesthetic, emotional. This is more than just looking - not pure observation - and so we could call it exploration.
Take a burning candle. What are children observing? Flames have a cultural and spiritual significance common to us all. But they are also complex examples of science working on many levels. Michael Faraday (1791-1867), arguably Britain's greatest-ever scientist, was moved to give the first Royal Institution Christmas Lecture, and to publish his notes, on the subject of The Chemical History of a Candle.
Wax is a fuel, just as surely as oil, gas or coal. It feels cold, hard and quite heavy, though in fact it is less dense than water (candles float) and it softens and melts well below 100oC (you can soften candle wax in hot water). And it burns, not in its solid state, or indeed its liquid form, but as wax gas.
Lighting the candle's wick has an amazing effect. The solid wax melts to liquid and rises up the wick. As it gets hotter, the liquid wax becomes a gas, and this bluish, unburnt vapour can be seen in the centre of the flame. Then the gas catches fire, and this incandescent glow can be seen in the yellow of the flame, which gives both heat and light.
Sometimes black soot curls up from the wick, but more often than not the candle burns away without a trace. The wax becomes carbon dioxide and water vapour, both lost into the atmosphere. Like petrol, there is no residue.
You can put out a candle by breaking "The Fire Triangle", which has three "sides" composed of fuel, oxygen, and heat. Blowing takes the wax gas away from the wick and, without fuel, the flame goes out. Pinching or snuffing deprives the candle of oxygen. You can put out candles by cold alone - a freezer can chill the flame. Or a thick wire loop round the flame can conduct away the heat, leaving the candle to smoulder for a moment or two before the flame dies.
All this, and much more, comes from informed observation of an everyday event. Children will gain from knowing what they are looking for (having an observation framework) and from linking their observations to their learning.
John Stringer is an in-service training provider, author, a TV consultant and science adviser to TES Primary
