Science Day in BIS4

Today I along with several other yr12 students visited The British International School #4, a primary school. The science co-ordinator of the school, Mr. Paul Wilkinson, was running a Science day for kids to have an opportunity to learn about the world around them. However he feared that younger students could be demotivated to learn and thought that it could be a good idea to invite older students to teach science. That is what we did.

Dina Ivanova and I planned to talk about tornadoes mainly because it is a major natural disaster that everyone should know about. To be perfectly honest choosing a topic wasn't my main concern at the first stages of organization. Initially, we were not given any information about the event except the date and the theme thus I took an initiative of contacting Mr. Wilkinson directly though the school's secretary. This is the email that I have sent to the school: 

My email was quickly answered by Mr. Wilkinson himself and I had an opportunity to get replies to my of my questions concerning the timetable, meal, year groups involved and technical issues. 

I have also made sure that the experiment that we used in our presentation was working smoothly by testing it in the lab a couple of days prior. This is the video that I filmed to then show it to my partner Dina: 

The actual experience was amazing. I absolutely LOVED the response of 6 year olds that we got, their learning enthusiasm was unexpectedly big! We have presented them with a short presentation as well as a BBC animation and a demonstration (as that in the video above). The especially enjoyed the latter as they got an opportunity to switch on the swirler to created their own tornadoes in a beaker.

I think that for the future we could have employed some of resources that the children would find appealing - possibly, reading the tornado extract from the Wizard of Oz or dressing up as amusing scientists to make the presentation more of an act that the children could sit back and observe. 

CAS Objectives: 

- undertaking a new challenge of teaching younger students

- planning and initiating our activity

- working collaboratively with Dina, Mr. Wilkinson, Mr. Gray and Mr. Mace

- developing new skills of communicating with younger students and presenting to them