Science teaching at Cheltenham College Junior School is about developing an understanding of the environment and making sense of it, primarily through experience, exploration, and interaction with scientific phenomena.
This enables pupils to take responsibility for their role in the maintenance of a healthy life, to develop awareness and common sense and to help create a safe environment. This will not only benefit themselves, but also their friends and other people as well as animals and plants in the world.
Children gain scientific understanding from the moment they begin to interact with their surroundings. In the early stages of development, hearing, watching, and playing, children begin to establish rules about how things in their environment react and behave. From this they develop their judgements about safety and risk, about their ability to explore, to create, to invent and to enjoy. They discover and use their senses of hearing, seeing, touching, smelling and tasting, which can be sources of pleasure or otherwise, as their powers of observation develop.
Scientific learning in the early years extends and enhances this natural curiosity by providing children with the opportunity to apply and further develop the skills that they have already mastered. When pupils learn Science they are obtaining a set of skills and a body of knowledge that will be required for the essential routines of life; for work, for pleasure and for creativity in the future - it is not taught simply to prepare pupils for a qualification required by future employers. Scientific investigation skills are also required for learning across the whole curriculum, whether in Art for mixing colours, in Geography for understanding the cause of weathering of rocks or in Design for assessing the suitability of materials for a given project. Science really is an integral and essential component of the whole curriculum.
Kim Parsley, Head of Science