British Science Week 2022
In March we celebrated British Science Week. British Science Week is a 10-day celebration and the idea behind the programme is to raise awareness, spark enthusiasm and celebrate science, engineering, technology and maths with people of all ages and from all walks of life.
This year St Stephens decided to focus on two themes within science which were STEM career opportunities and conservation.
A few months ago we reached out to parents/carers who have STEM careers and during science week six members of the St Stephens family donated their time to deliver aspirational career talks to our children. Our visitors had a varying range of careers from a Nuclear Engineer to a Physiotherapist awarded an OBE by the Queen! Nursery and Reception donned white lab coats and became scientists for the week, completing lots of exciting experiments to inspire them into the world of science.
Our aim was to demonstrate to our children that if you work hard and aspire to greatness you can achieve anything you want to!
Our second focus for the week was conservation, in particular the conservation of our school/local area. Each class was set a task to design and build a variety of structures such as bird boxes, hedgehog homes and bug hotels. Once these were made, they were placed in our environmental area so we can conserve the wildlife in and around our school. Year 5 took part in a litter pick to tidy up our school grounds.
In addition to the projects that happened in and around school we were extremely lucky to have the opportunity to work with Myplace. Myplace is an exciting and innovative Nature and Wellbeing project delivered by the Wildlife Trust for Lancashire, Manchester and North Merseyside in partnership with the Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS Foundation Trust. Myplace empowers people and their communities to connect with local environments in order to learn new skills, build resilience, meet new people and improve their physical health and mental wellbeing. Myplace run sessions on Thursday afternoons in our environmental area with members of the public however they kindly agreed to run a session with our Eco Council as part of British Science Week.
Finally, as a school we are extremely aware of the affect plastic is having on the Earth's oceans and wildlife. We want to help children understand that although conserving our local area is important, we must look at the bigger picture and try and do our bit to conserve the Earth for future generations. We set the children a challenge. We asked them to get creative and think of the best use of a recycled plastic bottle. We had all sorts of entries such as robots, cars, bird feeders, mice and an octopus!
We were thrilled to spend time celebrating science and we are certain the children felt inspired.