At my school, I’m on a journey of learning how to both lead and teach computing. I wrote about a planning framework previously. These next 2 posts are about lessons.
In some ways it’s easy teaching computing to children who have had no prior experience. Children at my school, whilst they are strong in IT and digital literacy, have had minimal experience of what used to be called the ‘control’ strand of the ICT curriculum, and is now called ‘computer science’. They are very much a blank page.
I am aware of the damage that can be done to blank pages. When teachers-who-know-a-little misteach, it makes teachers-who-know-a-lot despair. A criticism of much primary science by secondary science teachers is that children often do the fun stuff without really understanding it at primary, so that by the time they’re ready to do the fun stuff and really understand it at secondary, the students dismiss it because they’ve ‘done that lesson before’. Obviously without Bunsen burners. We don’t have Bunsen burners in primary schools.
Another example is algebra. @oldandrewuk was telling me recently how he would prefer it if no algebra teaching was done at primary, because it would make his job teaching algebra in secondary maths so much easier. Non-specialist maths teachers can’t help but teach misconceptions with a complex area such as algebra and thus it would be better to leave it to the specialists.
I’m aware that computing may be similar and I would be interested to know what secondary colleagues think about the computing teaching going in primary schools – do they expect to have to correct children’s misconceptions? Would it be easier to start from a secondary school blank page? Or is some knowledge a good thing?
Either way, I’ve taught three hours of computing today to a class in my school who were very much ‘a blank page’ and I’d be interested for people to pick apart my teaching and consider what is helpful and unhelpful to their long term progression as computer scientists. I’ll write about my lesson in my next post.
While I personally am quite interested in ‘Earth, Sun and Moon’, it is one of my least favourite topics to teach in Primary School science. It is to me a ‘dry topic’. It is one of those topics that there seems to be very little actual science you can do with the children. With forces you measure friction on cars down a ramp; with dissolving you can investigate the effect of heat on dissolving salt in water; with health you can measure pulse rate after exercise.
But what can you measure for Earth, sun and moon? Particularly when it has been raining. And it has rained heavily for the last two Wednesdays. Raining on my dry topic.
The planning document that I was working from started with the sentence: “On a sunny day…” Obviously that wouldn’t wash. But fortunately I had some things to help me:
A very large ball
A tiny bead
Some facts
Google Docs
Brain Pop
The first thing I did was to get the children to predict the relative sizes of the earth and moon, compared to the very large ball I had found in the PE cupboard.
The children initially predicted the wrong relative sizes for the earth and moon
I was pleased to see that the children predicted things wrongly, because it meant I could teach them something. So I gave them some facts – diameters even:
Sun = 1390000km
Earth = 12500km
Moon = 3500km
I then showed them how I could use a Google spreadsheet to calculate that relative to the very large ball of 60 cm diameter, the Earth would be 0.55 cm (Size of sun ÷ Size of Earth x Size of very large ball) and the moon would be 0.15 cm. It took a few moments for the children to realise that 0.55cm was really very small and was only the size of a bead on a bead string. The moon was a sprinkle that you might put on a cake.
Children hold up the correct relative sizes of Sun, Earth and Moon
The sprinkle was particularly difficult to see, but I think it made the point.
I then used Google Docs to work out the relative distance of the Earth from the Sun. The actual distance is 150 000 000km, which means that the relative distance for a 60cm diameter very large ball is about 65m. We paced that out in the corridor, with a teaching assistant holding the Sun in position and the children coming with me to be the Earth. We had to keep 2 sets of double doors open as we did so.
The Sun is a really long way from the Earth
Back to the classroom and how could we use this knowledge? Presented in a Google Doc was the first answer. The children all began their topic presentations to show others what they were learning.
Suzi's slide on the Earth compared to the Moon
Having seen that the children were beginning to get the relative sizes and distances of these celestial objects I wanted to move on to thinking about how the Earth moves round the sun, how it rotates and all that sort of stuff. No here’s where a shadow and some sunlight can be a helpful starting point. Still no shadows – it was still raining. But mercifully someone has invented Brain Pop.
Embedded within our Google Apps domain, Brain Pop is becoming an increasingly valued addition to our learning platform. It is especially exciting for me, being slightly obsessed with spreadsheets and data, because whenever the children finish a test, their score is automatically updated to a Google Spreadsheet that sits within my document list.
Brain Pop working on the school's Chromebooks
Shortly, the children had watched their first video – an effective explanation of the Earth – and were answering questions on it. Soon they had moved on to the phases of the moon. The one flaw in this – I had forgotten to bring any headphones – this meant that the inimitable sounds of Tim and Moby were soon issuing from 30 Chromebooks.
Mercifully, the rain stopped briefly and we were able to go outside and walk a quarter orbit of the sun (the field was a bit too muddy to walk the rest of the way).
You can just about make out "the Sun" in the distance
James and Maruwa were able to demonstrate the moon orbiting the Earth as the Earth orbits the Sun – earlier they had been delighted when watching Tim and Moby’s explanation of the concept: “It’s just like ours,” they exclaimed.
With new-found Brain Pop enthusiasm, I’m hoping that one or two more Brain Pop quizzes will have been completed on related subjects by this time next week. And I really hope the sun shines next Wednesday afternoon.
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