We have lift off!
At Saint Joseph’s Tyrella we have always taken great pride in our promotion of Science in the primary school. We are a Green Flag Eco school whose work on litter was used as a case study. We have had a regular Science Club for all age groups and we have taken part in various STEM projects trough out the years. It was therefore with great relish that we took on the task of starting the Project 500 programme in our school.
I first heard of the project through my wife who happens to be a Biology teacher in Assumption Grammar. Assumption had taken part in the project previously and had found it to have been of great value. As Saint Joseph’s is a feeder school for this Grammar school we decided that our schools would link together with some other local primary schools thus creating a learning community. The Grammar school would act as the Hub where we would all meet later in the project thus giving pupils the opportunity to prepare for transition. One of our first tasks was to create a core list of science books that would be available to all schools in the learning community. These books would then form the basis of a quiz that would be held later in the project as a day of celebration.
For these core books we also have created “Stile” like comprehension activities. For those of you who are unfamiliar with LDA Stile here is a brief explanation. The Stile tray contains tiles numbed 1 -12. Each tile has an image on the back. The children answer questions inserting the numbered tile into the correct position on the Stile tray. When the task is finished the pupil turns the tray over and if they have completed the task correctly they should be presented with an image that corresponds with an image on the top of the task page. Look it’s a lot simpler to do than explain! Pupils can use these activities once they have finished reading the Science books.
In our school we decided that the programme would run extensively in Key stage 2 however to launch the project we planned to get all the children of our school involved. We decided to naturally link the launch to World Book Day and we asked all the pupils to dress in a Space or Science theme. To coincide with this, we decided that we would also have a Junk Rocket competition. Pupils were asked to make rockets from odds and ends that they found round their homes. The results of this were truly unexpected. Never before has anything caught the pupils imagination than this space odyssey! Of the 75 pupils in the school we received over 70 rockets! These ranged in all shapes and sizes. From one the size of a toilet roll to one you could actually stand up in. Some were made of milk cartoons others were welded from metal. It seems like for two weeks the pupils put down their PlayStation controllers and with their parents became rocket engineers. One can only imagine the conversations about space and far of galaxies , materials and recycling and not to mention the dangers of super glue! For this reason alone Project 500 has been an outstanding success…..who knows where it will boldly go next.
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