Sustainability and global issues require teachers to be secure in their subject knowledge, to avoid consolidating any misconceptions and misinformation that our pupils face so often. With Great Sustainability Share resources, launched as part of GSSfS 2025, pupils will develop their understanding of sustainability by investigating the fundamental principles of air and water resistance, before considering how this influences green energy and global sustainability activity.
What are your go-to activities to elicit pupils’ understanding and conceptions of resistance and forces?
Using this resource, pupils at St Christopher’s were quickly engaged with hands-on/minds-on learning exploring concepts and understandings of air resistance. ‘Bag drag’ activities inspired them to use key vocabulary and retrieve experiences and ideas, working outdoors and collaboratively to experience the feeling and effect of wind.
They quickly got engrossed in water resistance activities, playfully collaborating to make things move and accelerate using the force of water.
Great Sustainability Share links National Curriculum science with geography objectives. With a focus on the physics of forces, pupils developed understanding of the foundational concepts of resistance. From a working scientifically perspective, the Question Teller resource supported pupils to design a double-variable question to investigate.
The lesson is in 2 parts:
Investigating air and water resistance using fair tests.
Working within the real-world context of how electricity is produced to provide people across the globe. Pupils research and draw conclusions about how green and traditional sources of energy production are required in different ways in different countries.
The GSSfS theme of ‘Connected Science’ led to pupils working across subject boundaries. Mimicking real-world scientific practices, they created models to test and gather data. They were given autonomy to ask their own scientific questions – with teachers encouraging the development of these to enable pupils to clearly identify key variables, e.g. How does the size of the blade affect the volts generated?
Pupils gathered and recorded results in their chosen format, selecting and formatting tables and taking responsibility for labelling titles, headings and adding units of measure.
The final challenge to all enquiries is to interpret the data to draw a scientific conclusion. The Great Science Share Conclusion Creator was ideal to support this process, enhancing pupils awareness of the need to revisit the enquiry question, consider what their evidence showed, and to underpin this with conceptual understanding.
“‘I conclude that the amount of air flow affected how many volts were generated. My measurements show that with the low air flow 0.01 volts were generated and with the high air flow 0.93 volts were generated. This can be explained by more air resistance turning the blades on the turbine and generating more voltage” ”
Juggling all the demands of the curriculum and adapting to the key themes of cross-curricular, real-world, hands-on learning and remembering to seek opportunities to profile sustainability is not an easy task. With Great Sustainability Share, leaders and teachers have a downloadable resource that models how this can be achieved.
Of course, tailoring to your pupils and contexts will always be required, however teachers have reported that they found learning was engaging and provided impetus for retrieval and new conceptual understandings.
“The children loved all of the practical science activities especially devising their own questions to investigate how wind turbines generate electricity. The enquiry day gave me so many ideas to enhance my own science teaching, modelling how to involve the children in becoming more independent scientists. The Toolkit is brilliant in giving support for pupils to devise their own questions, plan an enquiry and generate scientific conclusions”
Take a leap into this resource or others, by visiting www.greatscienceshare.org/great-science-resources-ideas – all of the enquiries model how working scientifically can be developed from 5-14 years.
GSSfS will culminate this summer, with the 17th June 2025 as the main share date. An ideal way to dedicate a few extra hours to science and join the global community of pupils asking, investigating and sharing questions with each other.
How to Get Involved
Share your pupils’ learning as part of this year’s Great Science Share for Schools
Tag us on X @GreatSciShare using #GSSfS2025
Check out our new Instagram channel @greatscishare