How to prepare your class for Developing Experts’ Live Lesson

At Developing Experts (DE), we love bringing science to life for your pupils. Our upcoming live lesson explores the rich world of the Working Scientificially Skills, walking your pupils through essential processes such as conducting fair tests, making predictions, recording results, and more - all skills that make up inquisitive and thoughtful work in science. 

If you’re worried that your class are a little rusty on the working scientifically skills and would like to get some ideas flowing before next week, have a look at some of our ideas below. 

Ideas for before the live lesson 

1. Create a detective-themed role play - KS1

Before the live lesson, turn your classroom into a detective scene, with your pupils as science detective solving ‘mysteries’. Give your pupils simple challenges that require observation and questioning - two important scientific skills. For example, you could try presenting your class with a set of fruit and ask them to examine the fruit and predict which ones will float or sink in water. Ask them to think about their reasons behind this - what clues can they find in the shape, size and texture of the fruit? 

To create even more excitement, you could hand out detective badges and magnifying glasses, or introduce even more categories for observation - such as vegetables or lego. This will help your pupils to be familiar with the processes of predicting and observing.

1. Set up a questions box - KS1 and KS2 

Get your class in the working scientifically mindset by creating a secret ‘questions box’ where they can post their science questions and predictions for any experiment that has come to mind. Encourage them to think freely and come up with their own questions, such as: ‘What will happen if we add ice to hot water?’ Then, at the end of a lesson or the end of the day, open the box and discuss each question as a class. 

1. Have a group brainstorm - KS1 and KS2 

Leading up to next week, engage your pupils in a collaborative and ongoing brainstorming session. Ask them to list as many questions as they can think of about how things work and why certain phenomena happen - no question is too big or too small! For example, they could ask: ‘Why does the sky look blue?’ or ‘What causes a volcano to erupt?’ This will build their confidence in asking questions and give them a functional space to explore their ideas. Across DE’s lessons, we have embedded a lot of these question types - which we call ‘Rocket Thinking’ - into our presentations. You can download all our rocket thinking questions by heading to the curriculum documents page. 

You could even use post-it notes to gather their questions and create a ‘Curiosity Board’ space in the classroom. Then, revisit it after our live lesson - and throughout the rest of the academic year - and tick off questions as they become answered! At the end of the year, your class will have a visual display showing how much knowledge they have learned and how many questions they’ve had answers. This could also be a good way to address any misconceptions or change in ideas.

Ideas for after the live lesson 

1. Explore different tools to collect data - KS1 

Instead of the usual graphs or tables, try having your class create their own data collection sheets with visual elements like colour-coding or counting using pictures. This will not only make data recording more accessible, but is also a good way to help younger classes understand how to organise information. 

1. Create science-themed journals - KS2 

After the live lesson, ask your class to design their own science journal where they document the activities that took place and any of their own predictions, observations and conclusions. Throughout the rest of the school year, encourage them to use this journal as a tool whenever you explore the working scientifically questions. They could use it to create drawings, add in notes or stick in pictures. At the end of the year, they’ll have a piece of work which documents their learning and progress in science!

Don’t miss our upcoming live lesson next Wednesday - you can find all the printable resources here. If you have any questions about the live lesson, or you have some ideas you’d like to share about profiling the working scientifically skills in class, please let us know your thoughts by emailing us at [email protected].