Support your pupils to ask - investigate - share by focusing on the skills they need!
Great Science Skills Starters
Age 5-7
Use these brand new resources to support your pupils in developing the scientific skills they need to carry out their own science enquiries to answer their own scientific questions. You will also benefit in further exploring how progression in scientific enquiry skills develops across your school.
Pupils need to develop their scientific skills through enquiries that are clearly related to the science knowledge they are developing.
The Great Science Skills Starters 5-7 are a collection of four direct to classroom videos that support pupils in learning a range of skills required to work through the scientific process. The videos aim to model the skill, provide an opportunity for pupils to practice the skill and finally challenging them to apply the skill when carrying out their own enquiries.
Each video has a set of teacher notes that explain where the skill fits in to the scientific process, suggest how to use the video in the classroom and give tips to develop the skill further with your pupils.
Resources to support the scientific enquiry cycle for 5-7 year olds
Duration: 6 minutes
5-7 ASKING QUESTIONS
This Great Skills Starter video and the accompanying notes are designed to help younger pupils develop skills in asking scientific questions, a skill at is required at both the beginning and the end of the scientific process.
This Science Skills Starter video is a resource to encourage pupils to develop their own questions that could be developed into investigations. Scientific questions mark the start of the scientific process for 5-7 year olds yet often conclusions can also lead pupils to ask further questions and the process begins again.
To support pupils in developing the art of question-asking, why not use some of our Question Makers, a collection of tools to support pupils in forming a range of scientific questions about the things that interest them.
Duration: 10 minutes
5-7 gathering evidence
These teacher notes and accompanying video are designed to help younger pupils develop the skills of gathering and recording evidence which they can then demonstrate when carrying out investigations to answer their own scientific questions for the Great Science Share for Schools. The gathering and recording of evidence provides useful opportunities for pupils to focus on key scientific vocabulary and apply their mathematics skills to their science learning.
This Science Skills Starter video supports young pupils in gathering evidence to help answer their scientific questions. It models how to make and record careful observations and introduces the idea of making simple measurements to help answer questions.
Duration: 8:20 minutes
5-7 interpreting tables and charts
These teacher notes and the accompanying video are designed to help younger pupils develop skills in looking closely at the evidence they have collected, asking questions of their findings, and thinking carefully about how it helps them to answer their scientific questions, supporting them in developing the skill of interpreting their evidence.
This Science Skills Starter video supports young pupils as they learn to use simple charts to analyse and interpret the evidence that they collect in the investigations, using their maths skills to think about what their evidence tells them and how that helps them to answer their scientific questions.
They get the opportunity to explore using Venn diagrams and Carroll diagrams to sort and group, as well as using tally charts, block diagrams and pictograms to compare.
Duration: 8 minutes
5-7 drawing conclusions
These teacher notes and the accompanying video are designed to help younger children develop the skill of using the evidence they have collected to answer scientific questions by drawing a conclusion, the accompanying Focus Frames and Conclusion Creators are designed to support pupils in practicing this skill independently.
This Science Skills Starter video supports young pupils in using the evidence they have gathered to answer their scientific question and draw a conclusion. It links back to the previous Science Skills Starter video where pupils learnt different ways to analyse and interpret their findings, supporting pupils in the next steps of developing this analysis into a conclusion.
Why not use our Focus Frames and Conclusion Creator tools to support pupils in reflecting on their questions and connecting them with the evidence they have gathered to draw conclusions?
