Our Science lead is Mr Collier.

We aim to stimulate the children’s scientific enquiry as they learn about Living Things, Materials and Physical Processes as set out in the National Curriculum.

Through practical experience the children’s scientific knowledge, skills and understanding will be developed. They will be encouraged to develop independent thinking skills, including generating questions that will lead to an investigation. They will make links between topics and discuss science based issues.

Using a cross-curricular and skills based approach, the children will experience a theme from each area of the science curriculum over a school year.

At St Margaret's our children love science and we love providing as them with a variety of opportunities including investigating; using the outdoors environment; meeting real scientists and engineers; using scientific equipment; using their imagination and gaining knowledge. We are very proud to have been awarded the Round 10 Primary Science Quality Mark Gold level for 2016.

We have also been awarded Gold for the Space Education Quality Mark.  The feedback we received was extremely positive 'St Margaret’s amazing portfolio shows what wonderful work has been done across the entire curriculum throughout every age group with children using Space Science as a theme for their maths lessons, science lessons as well as inspiring their work in English, Art and PE.'

STEM

STEM builds connections across the curriculum in science, technology, engineering and maths, giving a firm foundation to support our children's learning.  Children are encouraged to explore, make mistakes and link learning whilst being exposed to and taught key concepts which will help them to become contributing citizens in the future. At St Margaret's, our children engage in a number of STEM days, activities and skills as they progress through our school.

The children were enthused and inspired by our two visitors into school this week from Ventient Energy. Nikki and Alexa spoke passionately about their engineering careers and helped children to understand how we can produce clean energy through wind power. The children asked lots of fantastic questions! 

The staff and children at St Margaret's give a big thanks to the team at DC Services who worked so hard on redeveloping our school pond and surrounding areas. 

The children cannot wait to explore what creatures inhabit and we look forward to bringing more children down to this area for their lessons.

Visit to the BBKA Garden

Please click on the link to view the full news report...

Our fabulous science winners finally received their special medals and certificates this week. They also enjoyed a wonderful WOW science on line event before Easter. The performance by the science magician can be viewed by everyone here:

This Science Week we have been making the most of the sunshine and taking our science learning outside:

Year 5 had a very successful invertebrate hunt.

Year 4 showed great teamwork with their STEM challenge.

Year 3 loved exploring the copse and looking for signs of spring.

As part of their SCIENCE WEEK work, Year 6 found out about some Cutting-edge science research in Rainforests. 

Termites which make tunnels and decompose the leaf litter on the forest floor are helping the Rainforest be more resilient to global warming. Year 6 enjoyed investigating why termites are well adapted to droughts. They tested tunnel strength in wet and dry conditions.

Live Lambing

Year 5 and Year 6 enjoyed watching Lambing live from the hills of Wales with the NFU as part of their Science Week activities.

Science Book Judges

Well done and THANK YOU to our fantastic panel of science book judges from SM8- Varshini, Twesha, Emerson, Amy, Nathan and Scarlett.

They have spent the last two months, carefully reading all shortlisted books selected by the Royal Society for the Young People's Book Prize 2020.

Their judging comments were thoughtful and mature and they really enjoyed the opportunity to read such excellent science books.

All the books now belong to the school and hopefully many children will get the chance to enjoy them.

December 2020

Lock Down Look Up

The competition has closed and the results are in! We have been so impressed with all the fantastic entries and all of these have been printed out and make a brilliant display at school. It looks like we have some very keen future astrophysicists in the making. Everyone will receive a MERIT. With the standard so high and so many entries it was difficult to judge but...

Our winner is Hannah (SM8) Three other photos from Ella (SM3), Elise (SM3) and a joint entry from Oliver (SM9) and George (SM2) were highly commended.

November 2020

We are determined to continue to think positively about all the amazing things we can do even though we are in another Lockdown. With this is mind, we bring you a fun competition... Lock down look up! All the information is shown below:

November 2020

Children in SM8 have been exploring our solar system. They have made models outside using blow up planets and then investigated scale using playdough and border tape. Super team work SM8!

OCTOBER 2020

Some children in Year 6 are now published reviewers for the respected children's journal Frontiers for Young Minds.

They read the scientist's paper with Dr Ellis and then made suggestions to improve it and make it easier for young people to understand.

You can read the finish work here:

October 2020

Children in SM7 have been using their understanding of forces to design streamlined shapes and explore levers.

September 2020

SM9 worked hard using Newton Meters to measure the friction of a variety of shoes. Which do you think had the most friction... the walking boots, flippers, heelies, snow boots or flip-flops?

September 2020

The staff at St Margaret's and Briar Hill have worked together to renew our principles of science. These will be proudly displayed on a science board in every classroom.

Chemistry Workshop

September 2019 - Year 4 were enthralled by solids, liquids and gases thanks to the inspirational Nick Barker of Warwick University.

We are very proud of all the children who work so hard to produce a science project independently. The photo below shows the children whose projects were chosen to represent our schools at the University of Warwick Primary Science Fair. They had a fabulous day and were amazing ambassadors  for us all. As a federation, we won EYFS, took third place in KS1, and won Lower KS2 and Upper KS2 sections. What a fantastic outcome!

On Thursday 23rd May we held a fun and informative family learning night with scientist Josh Worch from the University of Birmingham. We learnt about how plastics are made now and how they could be made in the future and enjoyed making vegetable polymers (SLIME) ourselves.

SM10 had a super trip to the copse today finding hundreds of baby frogs in the long grass by the pond; leaf shield bugs in the trees; an orange spider and what appeared to be a cacoon. This was their summer visit and they were able to make interesting pie charts for species to see which season they preferred.

Year 4 had a fantastic opportunity to watch the chemistry of solids, liquids and gases in action with award winning chemist Nick Barker from Warwick University.

15/3/19 - The pupils in Year 6 proudly shared their amazing science projects with their buddies. Over 220 parents came to enjoy our inspiring Science Fair.

Engineers from Ricardo helped Year 5 plan a super-exciting crash testing investigation. The children had to show their best collaboration skills and demonstrate that they could work scientifically. A brilliant opportunity to use advanced equipment and talk to real scientists!

Chemlabs Show

On Tuesday 27th February, the whole school were entranced by Tim Harrison as he delivered his award winning science show on 'Gases in the air' . There were fire balls, bangs, and gasps of delight from the children and staff!  Tim has won 'Chemistry Teacher of the Year', is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the University of Bristol and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry. The children were challenged to make predictions, revised scientific vocabulary and really consolidated their understanding of solids, liquids and gases. 

Family Science Event

This Tuesday, we were really lucky to be visited by archaeologist and BBC TV and radio presenter, Julian Richards. Families from eight schools across the county were completely absorbed as they heard all about his life as an archaeologist; judging from the fantastic questions at the end it definitely inspired our young scientists and historians. He even stayed to chat and sign books 😊.

Visitor from Warwick University

Year 4 were wowed by Prof Nick Barker (Warwick University) who showed them solids, liquids and gases in a really spectacular fashion!

Mad Science Assembly

Georgia from Mad Science astounded the children in a super exciting assembly! They learnt about flammables and gasped as the flash paper disappeared before their eyes! Smoke rings were produced from an air cannon and wind bags were used to demonstrate lung capacity. Everyone was amazed by the finale of icing sugar being ignited to create dragon breath!

In their final Imagineering Club, the children showed impressive soldering expertise. They have successfully constructed a radio, moisture and fuse testers!

Imagineering Club

Year 6 Imagineering Club have been working in teams to try and build the strongest bridge. All of the bridges have now been tested to destruction by adding weights ... can you guess which team won?

We have been investigating...

Year 6 visited the copse to identify trees using a key and also had an opportunity to discover what was in our pond with a pond dipping session. We are going to be investigating what changes happen in our environment over time.

On the 9/3/16 we held our second Family Learning evening. Over 80 people were there including families from our neighbouring school, St Joseph's Catholic Primary. We enjoyed a fascinating talk from Prof. Andrew Levan from Warwick University about SUPERVOVAE.

Year 4 pupils told us what they had learnt:

"When you put 1 proton and 1 neutron and 1 electron together you form Hydrogen. To make Helium, you need 2 protons, 2 neutrons and 2 electrons."

"Two stars colliding make a blackhole!"

"We found out that approximately 701 billon supernovae have happened."

Warwick University Visitors

At the end of January, Year 4 pupils were lucky to have Marianne Costa and Nick Barker from Warwick University come and give a fantastic talk about solids, liquids and gases. This linked in brilliantly with their learning about states of matter. Arjun said that the 'Chemiluminescence' was one of the most amazing things he had ever seen in his life! Other highlights included observing the effects of liquid nitrogen and liquid oxygen. Did you know that oxygen can reignite a flame? Even Mrs Williams-Cook was impressed by the explosive burning of alcohol fumes which left just a few drops of water as a waste product. Could a St Margaret's pupil be inspired to be a scientist of the future? Watch this space!

Natural World Experience

Year 4 got a very close encounter with lots of vertebrates and invertebrates when 'Natural World Experience' came into school.

Crash Testing - Family Learning Evening

On Wednesday 4th November, we held our first Family learning evening. Over 65 children and parents attended a fascinating presentation about crash testing by Tim Lewis CEng MIMechE principal engineer at JLR.

Arshnoor, a year 4 student who attended, wrote a super account of the evening, this is part of it:

'When I went to the crash testing dummies presentation it was very interesting. We saw a real crash test dummy. Charlie was its name. That was chosen because it worked for a boy or a girl! He or she represented a 6 year old for the crash tests...There was a small experiment with bin bags and eggs...When the volunteer dropped an egg on an empty bin bag, it broke...When an egg was dropped on a bin bag full of air it broke again...Lastly the bag was full of air but had holes so it could SQUISH and the egg was as good as new!

Air bags aren't about the bang but the squish.'

Some of our Year 6 children have been enjoying building bridges at Imagineering Club with an engineer Phil Hodgson and Mrs Ellis.

Year 4 have been outside this term firstly collecting leaves and making a key to identify them and then finding bugs as they learnt how to classify invertebrates.