Let's do Science!

Hi again, fans of twitter, instagram....today I will tell you something of the Science classes in Belle Vue Girl's Highschool, where we went as teacher assistant, and the experiencie was very rewarding!

First of all, I find necessary to talk about the Science subject, according to the National Curriculum of England. The first difference with the Spanish Curriculum is that Science includes the disciplines of Biology, Chemistry and Physics, namely, they are not taught in different subjects. As I said in my last post, each teacher has his/her own classroom, with all the material and resources that they need. When we asked a chemistry teacher why the students have to move to the different classes (remember that in Spain the teachers had to move to the class and the students remained in the same class during the whole course, although there were some exceptions), and this was her answer:

"This is my chemistry class, here I organise what I am going to teach, and here I have all the materials I need. Why should I move to other classes?"

Needless to say, science classrooms in Belle Vue are not like the typical classes. Science classrooms are taught in LABS. It is something logical, since if you want to "create" scientists, they have to do science. Talking about the labs, all of them had everything you need to do simple experiments, which can make a big difference in the motivation of a student: as Goggles (special glasses to protect your face from acids, fire, etc), test tubes, Bunsen burners, or Petri plates.

The first class we assisted was a Chemistry Class, where they were studying the chemical bonds. In the beginning the teacher started to explain what it was a chemical bond, and wrote some exercises (the typical class) but then...voilá! He asked the students for doing an experiment in class! They had to use a device to check if a salt (solid and liquid) conducted electricity. At the end of the lesson, everybody knew the answer, since they had seen that with their own eyes.

We were very impressed as well of the Microbiology classes. The teacher of biology was always friendly and kind to us, receiving us with a smile everyday. In her class, the students worked with real bacteria!! They grew then in a Petri plate, and when they had grown, and they had a visible culture, they took pictures of them. Students asked a lot of questions about their "little monsters", since not all the cultures were the same, some of them were contaminated or had different strains. I was very jealous, why couldn't I have the same classes in highschool??

       Say hello to our little friends!