Celebrating British Science Week 2019 at BIS Hanoi

The theme this year was ‘Journeys’ and we have used that theme to run workshops across the school; Secondary school children ran sessions with every student from the Early Years all the way through to Year 6, the secondary students helped them to understand:

• how worms journey by tunnelling their way through the soil
• how caterpillars, insects and spiders journey around their habitats
• how caterpillars can journey into a new body and emerge as a butterfly
• how boats can float on water and make journeys across the sea
• how plastic makes its journey in our ecosystem and how it affects it
• how rockets can journey into space and between planets
• how cars can be designed to make your car journeys more efficient

Miss Fitzpatrick, Deputy Head of Primary, commented on seeing the students faces in one of the sessions, “When we talk about developing a sense of awe and wonder in science, their faces clearly reflected that!”

“It was great to witness the older students helping the younger ones with their learning, my children loved the workshop,” said Miss Ower.

We tried not to limit ourselves to just talking about these issues so the Secondary students ran interactive practical workshops inside the classroom and within the school grounds. Our aim was to enthuse all of our students in the limitless possibilities science can offer them and to try to get them asking questions of their teachers and their parents about anything they are interested in, if we have established more thinking about our world and ourselves then we have succeeded!

Mr Labelle told us afterwards that “Our students fully understood the science of what was happening, the year 8 pitched it perfectly, our Year 4’s were able to use your vocabulary words in their summary after the lesson with ease.”. It appears that our ambition in affecting every student may have been successful.

To compliment these sessions, the entire school has also been taking part in a competition to see who could provide a solution to the problem of waste plastic in our environment, the winning entries will be on display for everyone to see next week.

Science isn’t just about the physical world though and Heads of Year/Form tutors, in the exam year groups, have been using this week to discuss emotional journeys and the journey we follow through life, allowing them an opportunity to discuss these issues and help form strategies to help them progress in their journeys with more security and confidence.

To finish off the week we ran two assemblies for the Primary & Early Years and the Secondary students where we showed them a variety of demonstrations too big for a classroom and their enjoyment was very clear to see, Mrs Langford stated “The assembly was brilliant, the children were saying how much fun it was!”

I would like to thank every teacher in Early Years & Primary plus all of the teachers in Secondary Science (including our very hard working technicians!) for all of their ideas and hard work in setting this up but also to all of the form tutors and students who made the whole week happen with such impact.

We can’t wait to do this again next year!

Paul Forsythe

(Head of Science)