Science
At Gainsborough Primary and Nursery Academy, science is at the heart of our curriculum. Our dedicated approach aims to ensure that all children develop a curiosity for the natural world, become confident in scientific enquiry, and foster a love for discovering how things work.
Our curriculum is used to inspire a lifelong passion for science. By integrating high-quality topics and creating vocabulary-rich environments, we expose our children to relative scientific language and engage in scientific experiences that sparks their curiosity and enthusiasm.
While the National Curriculum provides the foundational framework for our teaching, we go beyond it to enhance our students’ learning. We enrich our curriculum with additional skills, knowledge, and understanding so that children know more, remember more, and comprehend more about the world around them.
Our goal is to motivate our learners to become reflective and resilient scientists, empowering them to take ownership of their progress and develop a lifelong love of science.
At Gainsborough, we want children to be inspired and encouraged and to be inquisitive about the world. We want to provide them with skills that are useful across their learning and life. Science is for everyone. Giving them an understanding of science allows children to make judgements about technologies, health and other important factors of the world.
At Gainsborough we want all children to have a positive experience of science giving it clear purpose and meaning in the world today, so that it excites and engages ALL learners and teachers.
Developing the children’s vocabulary is paramount at Gainsborough Primary and Nursery Academy. As science is a discipline that relies heavily on the ability to understand new terms and concepts, our strong focus on vocabulary helps our students reduce the barriers they have to learning and communicate using the appropriate terminology.
Our curriculum is designed to ignite the imagination of our pupils. Planning for science is a process in which all teachers are involved to ensure that the school gives full coverage of the National Curriculum programmes of study for Science 2014 and ‘Understanding of the World’ in the Early Years Foundation Stage.
Science teaching at Gainsborough involves adapting and extending the curriculum to match all pupils’ needs making it bespoke for our pupils and community.
Science at Gainsborough is sequential, allowing children to develop their skills and knowledge over time, deepening learning to provide the foundations so they know more, remember more and are able to do more. In giving the children a variety of skills our children can develop and reach their individual potential and succeed in life. At Gainsborough scientific enquiry skills are embedded throughout the primary curriculum. For example: plants is taught in KS1 and again in KS2 in order to build on their prior knowledge, embedding their knowledge into long term memory and further develops their skills.
Teachers create yearly long-term plans with the support of subject leaders, identifying the curriculum end points. Medium term plans are developed collaboratively with subject leaders and class teachers. Lessons are sequential and use a variety of scientific enquiries throughout each topic. In giving the children a variety of skills, our children can develop and reach their individual potential and succeed in life. These different scientific enquiry skills (observing over time, pattern seeking, research, comparative and fair testing and identifying, classifying and grouping) are embedded into lessons throughout each topic.
This is done so that the children will become more independent in their problem solving, to discover answers to their questions and to become ‘true scientists’.
Each science unit begins with a pre-assessment task, where children develop (or are given in KS1) a bank of vocabulary to support their learning. At the end of each unit, children are assessed through a variety of processes: talk like an expert, low stakes quizzes and formal assessment where appropriate. Each lesson includes a recap of prior ‘sticky’ knowledge (this could be from a previous lesson in the sequence or a prior learning from previous year groups where necessary) to support children in knowing more and remembering more. Scientific ‘sticky’ knowledge is stuck into the children’s books at the beginning of a topic and uses as a focus for assessment.
The successful approach to the teaching of science at Gainsborough Primary & Nursery Academy will result in a fun, engaging, high quality science education, that provides children with the foundations for understanding the world that they can take with them once they complete their primary education.
Assessment is teacher based and formed using formal strategies (e.g. end of topic assessment tasks, quizzes) and informal strategies (verbal/written outcomes, talk like an expert).
Formative assessment is used as the main tool for assessing the impact of science at Gainsborough Primary & Nursery Academy as it allows teachers to identify misconceptions and the gaps to be addressed more immediately rather than building on insecure scientific foundations.
Scientific Enquiry
At Gainsborough, children are given the opportunity to develop their scientific enquiry skills. They are introduced to the following enquiry approaches in EYFS and encouraged to develop these skills as they progress through the school.
