Activity Title: Literacy and numeracy development through MyScience

About:

Teachers describe the ways that MyScience provides an engaging context for skill development.

Video 1: How literacy and numeracy skills can be developed.

Captions:

Music

Teacher: I suppose the biggest issue originally was that a lot of the

children have not been exposed to Science at a or high quality Science

as far as an investigation that they're doing themselves

prior to my coming into the MyScience program.

Some kids had in my class had done it already in the previous two years

when they were in year three but some have never done anything

really to do with Science and most of them have all done the

recipe based stuff with just 'this is the method' and

'this is what I want you to do when it's finished',

it was not let's find something for ourselves.

So, the biggest problem was probably getting them to actually

write a report as well, the structure of a report was

very difficult for them, they just had no real concept how a lab report

should be set out and the information that should be included.

Another big thing was graphing, graphing and tables are a big, big thing

in Science in particular when it comes to a final product

and is doing your results and a lot of the kids although they knew

what they were 'I know what a picture graph is' or

'I know what a bar graph is', 'I know how to make one',

'I know how to read it' but what is it really telling you about your result

and interpreting that information is very difficult.

We decided to help that was to do our graphing unit for Maths alongside

our conducting of MyScience and it worked really well,

they got much better analysis in the end.

Assistant Principal: You can almost teach your measurement and your

data lessons around it because anything that they're doing in Science

they have to be able to measure and in some cases they might be

measuring in grams and so they have to use scales to measure them

and they have to be accurate, they have to understand

whether they're measuring in grams or kilograms.

Sometimes if it goes over then they might have to be able to convert

between grams and kilograms or metres and centimetres

depending on what they're measuring.

They have to do a lot of thinking, they have to be able to use graphing,

to do data on the computer, to enter their data and turn it

into a graph which they actually have a need to do.

There's so much that you can do about asking kids

what colour eyes they have or what's their favourite sport,

it's a bit boring but this actually has a purpose and when they can

see their results in the form of a graph and see how much clearer it is

than if they have a table but even what to put in their table

it just makes it become more real, the teaching of Maths is a lot clearer.

With writing they have to write up their report so they have to

understand that they've got an audience and their audience

has to understand what they're writing.

There's a little bit of a problem because the English syllabus

doesn't have a scientific report as being one of its things

which I think they probably should have.

But they have to understand the idea of paragraphs are important,

the order that they put things in, their use of connectives,

those sorts of things are very important and it's theirs, they own it,

it's their choice what they did and they're writing up their experiment,

they have to be able to communicate it and other people can give them

feedback on it which can make it better for them.

Notes:

Analysing and reporting on a real science investigation give students something to communicate about.