Bloomsbury Curriculum Basics: Teaching Primary Science
Welcome to the online resources for Bloomsbury Curriculum Basics: Teaching Primary Science by Peter Riley. Here you will find a range of helpful resources to use alongside the book.
The Assessment sheets aim to help teachers condense the work carried out in Teaching Primary Science into a set of evidence that can be used to assess pupils against the National Curriculum for Science.
Click on the links on the left hand side to download what you need.
About the book
Teaching Primary Science equips non-specialist teachers to confidently deliver engaging and well-informed lessons, that account for the changes in the National Curriculum. This is a very practical and easy to apply programme for teaching Science either in your own classroom, or to implement across the school in the role of a coordinator.
Teaching and assessment
During the teaching of a science course, many strategies are used to help in the learning process and all of them can produce evidence that can be used for assessment. However, not all the evidence gathered at one time from one pupil may show attainment of a particular objective, and many early pieces of work may simply show making progress towards attainment rather than actual achievement. When a piece of work does show evidence of attainment, it needs to be identified by date or other code for future reference if required for an external assessment.
The assessment sheets are designed to help in recording evidence of attainment for each pupil, as the evidence occurs. The evidence may be in many forms, such as a written piece of work, a labelled diagram, a photograph of a model that has been made, photographs of an experimental result and discussion, or a teacher-devised test.
It is intended that each child in the class has a sheet in which their progress is charted. The information can then be used in two forms of assessment:
- In summative assessment, for establishing the level of progress of the pupil and the degree to which the national standard for science has been achieved.
- In formative assessment, to stimulate new teaching strategies where evidence shows the pupil is having difficulty.
