CONTRIBUTORS
“The outlook is positive”
This month, regular Education Today contributor
GRAHAM COOPER, head of education at Capita SIMS, calls on teachers to embrace the positive.
Budget biology - food tests and skeletons
With school funding permanently in the news, Education Today’s resident STEM columnist KIRSTY BERTENSHAW updates her previous series looking at doing classroom science on a shoestring – starting this month with some new ideas for biology.
Food tests
It always surprises me how quickly the school year gains pace. A few short weeks ago, we were sharpening our pencils and polishing our shoes for a new academic term, and now we are just a few short weeks from the chaos surrounding Christmas.
The calm before the storm is a good chance to take stock of any targets you set yourself to do things differently this school year. For those who work in schools, September is a natural starting point for new approaches, and there’s certainly no shortage of advice out there on social media, blogs and websites if you are looking to raise your game.
However, enthusiasm can mean a tendency to bite off more than we can chew. When we want to make a significant and lasting impact on a child’s performance, sticking to one fresh idea and really making it work is much more effective.
If some of your new term’s resolutions have now fallen by the wayside, how about embracing the power of the positive? Celebrating success in your school could be just the thing to keep pupils’ dispositions sunny as it gets colder outside.
At the beginning of a new term, all pupils face challenges. But there is also a palpable sense of excitement and novelty about a new class and a new timetable.
Half way through the term, that novelty might be starting to wear off. Homework is getting more difficult and reality has started to set in. Highlighting successes can keep morale high. Schools are, on the whole, very good at recording their pupils’ achievements. But we should never underestimate the power of sharing this good news with parents. Of course, it’s important to inform parents of concerns if a pupil has been late to school three times this week, or has not handed in their homework. But telling a parent that their child has worked really well on a project, or helped a classmate, could be equally important. Sharing positive news has a huge impact on the child’s motivation. If parents echo the praise a child has received at school, the positive effect is multiplied, and could help a child settle in to their new year, or encourage them to try harder.
Schools already record a lot of positive achievement and behaviour, and sharing this with parents need not take up valuable time and add to the workload. Some schools send out postcards or letters with good news, but a text, email or notification through an app can be a fast, effective way of making a big impact on parental engagement. With technology such as the SIMS Teacher app, it’s easy for teachers to record incidents as they happen, so if someone kindly helps a Year 7 pupil who is lost in the corridor, or puts in a great performance on the football pitch, these achievements need not go uncelebrated. Teachers and school leaders can gain from focusing on the positive achievements of their pupils and communicating them to families, which is really simple to do now via the ParentApp. Giving good news is nearly as satisfying as receiving it.
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There are two easy food tests that can be done with minimum cost and effort. The iodine test for starch only requires first aid concentration iodine. In the starch test, the iodine turns blue-black in the presence of starch. Traditional spotting tiles used for this experiment are easy to spill and cost £40+ for a pack of ten. I used to use paper plates, but the paper causes the iodine to change colour after a while, so I now use cheap, reusable ice cube trays. The fat test requires food to be rubbed on filter paper, and if there is a translucent stain that remains, the test is positive. Filter paper can also be purchased online, or coffee filters can be used instead. Cut up the filter paper into smaller pieces to prevent wastage. As for foods, you don’t need to purchase special foods for these tests - raid the kitchen instead! Only small amounts are required for each test, so use a handful of cereal for a positive starch test. A slice of bread is probably more than a whole class needs, but will also give a positive result. Dried pasta or rice can be used, it just takes a while to react - cooked versions react faster. Butter, cooking oil and crisps give positive results for fats, especially common “cheese puff-style” snacks. Finely chopped fruits and vegetables can be used, but be aware they will leave a stain on filter paper which is just water; it dries and disappears. Some foods are harder to test such as yogurt and milk – I don’t recommend trying the fat test with these but the starch test is possible.
Bones and skeletons
How do joints work? How do bones interact with each other? A really easy way to explore this is to use chicken wings or whole legs, not thighs or drumsticks as it must have a joint. These are usually cheaper as they require less processing. A safer way to explore the chicken is to cook it first. Roasting the chicken reduces salmonella risks, particularly if the pupils are likely to touch their faces during the practical. It also makes it easier to disassemble the chicken to access the ligaments and bones. Before dissecting the chicken, hold both ends of the wing or leg and wiggle it to show the joint moving. This allows pupils to investigate how far the joint moves and in which direction. Cooked chicken comes apart easily by hand so no tools are necessary. It can be greasy if cooked with the skin on, or dry if cooked without the skin.
A fun way to study bones is to save some of the bones from the cooked and dissected chicken and place them in vinegar for three days to a week. The ethanoic acid in vinegar dissolves the calcium leaving behind the collagen. The calcium makes bones hard, but the collagen makes them bendy, or we would break our bones very easily. The bones soaked in vinegar have mostly collagen left so are bendy! You can also open up the bones and see the bone marrow now, where blood cells are made.
November 2017
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