ABSTRACT
Lesson 1. Just wondering why the class is so late when a cheeky face appears saying ‘ ’Ello Miss-can we come in?’ ‘Why are you so late?’ ‘We were kept in to explain about the fight.’ Decide it is better not to know the details and settle them into the lab. Glad to see that most of the children are clutching small bags of pasta. We are going to find out how pastas differ in the amount of water absorbed. AT 1 (Scientific Investigations) has turned us all from science demonstrators, illustrating what is already proven, into open-ended investigators. Gone are the certificates to students to celebrate the two-millionth person to confirm Faraday’s laws; here should be the certificates to teachers in recognition of their proficiency in spotting opportunities to vary as many variables as possible in as many ‘jolly’ experiments as possible. Hopefully, the experiment captures the interest of the least motivated whilst providing opportunities to achieve the higher-level skills demanded by the National Curriculum. Spaghetti et al. serves as the light touch in a stodgy section of National Curriculum attainment targets. So, on with the experiment we planned last lesson. Now I need to remind them of safety aspects, making it a fair test, and, thirdly, procedure. Everyone is champing at the bit, and as soon as I say ‘start’, twenty-one children set up their apparatus. The lab is a veritable hive of activity. I start to visit different groups of children. ‘Tell me what you have done’, I ask. ‘We’ve weighed some white spaghetti and now we are boiling it in water for 10 minutes. Then we are going to drain and reweigh it to see if it’s got heavier.’ ‘What would that tell you?’ ‘How much water it’s taken in, Miss.’ ‘Good’, I say, ‘could you try to calculate it as a percentage?’ ‘You bet’, they say brightly.
