ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, attempts have been made to relate the science that pupils will be doing to their everyday experiences. Topics have been selected, as the examples in the text demonstrate, to give pupils some understanding of their environment and the world they live in through experimentation. Some may claim that this sort of aim falls within the domain of environmental studies programmes. Perhaps it does, too, but as has been illustrated repeatedly in this book, the boundaries of what constitutes science are and should be extremely blurred. This chapter will be concerned with the possibilities of doing science outside the classroom—by that I mean that the stimulus for exploration, the ideas for investigations, come from the child’s experiences out of school. The home, parental workplaces, shops, parks and the countryside can all provide exciting stimuli for scientific projects or investigations. My intention is not to outline a whole project around these topics but to pick out a few scientific investigations which could easily arise from them. Just as in the discussions relating to the selection of content for science activities, the emphasis here will be on the way pupils carry out their investigations: the explorations and the scientific method will take precedence over the accumulation of facts.
