Miss J's Science Teaching Blog

As an astrobiologist extremophiles are amazing and such an important little organisms and they should be in your classroom too! Extremophiles are organisms that have adapted to survive in some of the most extreme conditions on Earth. In Astrobiology extremophiles are used to see how we can extend the biogenic markers we use when searching for life.    So, how can these tiny organisms make cross curricular links in science?    Well, these tiny organisms can help you link all three sciences together seamlessly, and I am going to tell you how! In Physics, when teaching how nuclear power stations work at GCSE we always talk about the water used as a coolant. Well, there is an extremophile (my favourite one in fact) called ‘radio resistant’ extremophiles. These are extremophiles that live in the coolant water in nuclear power stations, most power stations actually use antibiological treatments in the water now due to them. They have adapted to be able to repair and replac...

After my first week of teaching my full timetable live, I have some successes and some well... carnage! My first ever live lesson with Year 13 P1&2 Monday morning was going so well, my writing on the graphics tablet was finally legible and the students were happily unmuting and interacting with me. Skip to the end of the lesson and I'm happily going through the exam question annotating on my computer so they can all see feeling very smug and confident. I get to the end of the exam question, one of them unmutes "Miss, were you talking during that because if you were you were on mute". After a long discussion we established that they had happily sat there watching me annotate over my screen without thinking to tell me they couldn't hear me... the explanation was much more concise second time round! Today P1&2 however wasn't a patch on Monday year 13. Joined my teams meeting seeing about half of my students waiting for me in the lob...

  If 2020 has taught us anything it’s that scientific literacy is important. It always has been and always will be. I don’t mean being able to read and understand a paper on theoretical physics but being able to read and understand journal articles, newspaper articles or magazine articles on science.   In terms of our pupils, they are examined on their use of scientific terminology. For a typical triple physics GCSE paper ~35-40% will be maths and equations leaving ~60-65% as written questions. Our pupils have to be able to write coherently complex scientific ideas and we need to help them with this. I therefore believe it is our duty as science teachers to expose our pupils to as many examples of actual scientific writing as possible and help them to develop their vocabulary skills.    To be able help them, we don’t need to teach them about the details of how we learn to read, spell etc – although it is very interesting for us as educators – but we should teach them...