I Knew It All

I Knew It All

by Clare MacDermott, St Patrick's Primary School, Bundaberg, Qld

Last year, while teaching Year 3, I trained to be a Primary Investigations inservice trainer. I thoroughly enjoyed the training and had a good understanding of the topics presented. One of the experiments we worked on was from Book 5, entitled 'Bottle divers'. This experiment worked well for all groups in the training session and was very simple.

This year I have a Year 5 class, and several weeks ago I started Primary Investigations Book 5, Unit 1, Introducing systems. 'Bottle divers' is one of the lessons in this unit. On Monday I ensured that the children knew the experiment we would be doing the next day and discussed the equipment they would need to bring to school. As I had done the experiment before, I did not practise it before the lesson. This was my mistake! I did not take into account the array of different bottles and eye-droppers the children would bring in. The lesson was a complete failure – only one of the ten groups managed to make their diver work.

Forget it and move on. This was my first reaction. However, the children continued to question our lack of success. Over the next few days they began to bring in new and different equipment to try the experiment again. They wanted to solve the problem. We tried and tried again – using different water levels, weighting our divers with Blu-tack to make them float vertically, and so on. We worked, we questioned and we tried again. At the end of 2 weeks the children had a variety of divers and in one case, more than one diver to a bottle. We had solved the problem together.

This was supposed to be a one-off activity to explore a simple system and the components that interact within that system. It was supposed to take 45 minutes. However, ours evolved into 3 hours of testing, questioning, experimenting and problem solving.

I was ready to give up and move on, but what followed was a better learning experience. Had the activity been a success on the first attempt it would not have engaged the children in scientific thought as successfully.

Our bottle divers stayed intact on the blackboard ledge for the rest of the term. Many children showed their divers to friends from other classes or explained the system and how they achieved success to parents who visited the room. Several days after we managed to make all our divers work, a boy from the class came to school with a Bundy Devil Dancer which he had found at a local craft market. This little devil acted in the same way as our eye-droppers. What a great way to finish!

This article was published in the Science Teachers Association of Queensland Newsletter, July 1996, pages 12-13. It has been adapted by Academy staff.