Context

For one term I was asked to teach science in one of the special classes in a secondary school. There were 7 students ranging from Year 9 to Year 12 supported by an SSO. While they had studied science in the classroom before, they hadn’t been in a science lab or done and investigations outside of “kitchen science”. One of my aims for the term was to get them in the laboratory to do some physics, chemistry or biology investigations.

When I first started in the class, I already had a good relationship with the students as I had relieved in there on many occasions. The class was normally well behaved and friendly, so I didn’t foresee any problems in practical lessons. On the first day, we talked about what science they had done in the past and what they were interested in. We came up with this list:

That was still a lot for one term, so we eventually decided to go with momentum / velocity, What are chemicals / periodic table, Habitats. If there was time left, we would pick another topic.

Having different topics that spanned different year levels, meant that I had to have a good grasp of the science curriculum. Some of the topics even spanned several year levels in themselves. I needed to carefully curate materials and learning outcomes / intentions so that I could cover the topics that they wanted while still giving them the background knowledge that they needed to be successful.

Actions

I drew up a rough timeline, then made a unit plan for each topic

Results

Evaluation

Standards and Focus areas