The atomic nucleus with its orbiting electrons is one of the iconic images of the twentieth century. To some it promised unlimited energy, to others it signified the horrors of nuclear war and to many it means the dangers of radiation. The concept of a tiny nucleus surrounded by electrons was announced by Ernest Rutherford in 1911 but there is debate about whose idea it was.
J J Thomson discovered the electron in 1897 and suggested that they were embedded in an atom sized blob of positive charge – the “plum pudding” model as it came to be known. A choc chip muffin is possibly a more up to date analogy. There were, however, other ideas.
In 1901, Jean Baptiste Perrin, whose work on Brownian motion proved, to nearly everyone’s satisfaction, that atoms existed, suggested that the electrons may orbit around a sphere of positive charge rather like the planets around the Sun.
Three years later, Hantaro Nagaoka, a Japanese scientist, imagined electrons arranged in rings around a mass of positive charge like the rings around Saturn.
Neither Perrin nor Nagaoka provided any evidence for their ideas and they were not widely publicised.
Rutherford supported Thomson’s theory. Born in New Zealand he had been a research student at Cambridge under Thomson from 1895 to 1898. He had then moved to McGill University in Montreal, Canada where he did Nobel Prize winning work on radioactivity. In 1907 he became Professor of Physics at Manchester University. He suggested an experiment to a young German scientist, Hans Geiger, to explore Thomson’s plum pudding model. Alpha rays would be fired at a piece of gold leaf just a few hundred atoms thick. The scattered alpha particles would be observed in a detector that Geiger designed. Each alpha particle showed up as a tiny flash of light.
Over the next couple of years, Geiger, with student Ernest Marsden, painstakingly observed the sparkles of thousands and thousands of alpha particles. They showed that, as expected, the small, fast moving, positively charged alpha particles passed through the gold leaf with small deflections caused by the positive “pudding” of the atoms. Then Rutherford made a surprising suggestion. He told Marsden to see if any of the alpha particles were deflected at larger angles. Marsden found that about 1 in 8000 alpha particles bounced back after colliding with the gold leaf.
Rutherford was astounded. He later said it was like a cannonball rebounding from a sheet of tissue paper. He realised that the “plum pudding” model could not explain this observation. Using Geiger and Marsden’s results he was able to calculate that the positive charge and mass of the atom must be packed into a tiny nucleus at the centre of the atom. The nucleus must be less than 1x10-14 m in diameter or less than a ten-thousandth of the diameter of the atom itself. Rutherford noted that the size of the nucleus compared to a “fly in a cathedral”, but the fly had all the mass of the cathedral.
Not much notice was taken of Rutherford’s 1911 paper and it took the work of Nils Bohr to explain why the electrons occupied fixed orbits, but gradually the image of electrons revolving around a central nucleus caught the imagination of artists and writers. Almost all pictures, however, have the ratio of size of the nucleus and the atom wrong and have more in common with Nagaoka’s vision.
Activities1. Look for images of the nuclear atom. Measure the ratio of diameters of the nucleus and atom.
2. Various analogies were used by scientists to describe the models of the atoms and their experimental results. Think of other ways of describing the results of the gold leaf experiment and comparing the size of the nucleus and atom.
3. Is it right that the nuclear atom is attributed to Rutherford?
4. Find out more about the life and work of Ernest Rutherford.
5. Discuss the responses people have to the term “nuclear”.
Peter Ellis
Wednesday, 2 November 2011
Don't count on levels
Those of us in science education who’ve ‘been round the block a couple of times’ will remember a time before National Curriculum levels. Rather more of us will recall the news coming through about the ending of the tests in science at KS3. Don’t read into this either a love for or hatred of levels and testing, but rather an acknowledgement of the impact they’ve had.
What the concept of levels provided was a clear focus on the relative complexity of ideas. Some concepts are more challenging than others and some skills are at a higher level. What the testing did was to provide a benchmark (and also to give students an experience of summative assessment). Although there was much relief at their demise, many schools still use them.
Both levels and the associated testing have pitfalls of course. Accepting that there is a hierarchy of concepts is easier than judging it and there was some questionable folklore in some cases about what constituted progression to higher levels. There was some consternation the year the tests included a question on balanced forces at a fairly basic level (“everyone knows that balanced forces are level 6”). The students weren’t in on the folklore of course and most, including quite a few who weren’t at Level 6, did well on it.
It’s also difficult for teachers to develop confidence in their own assessment practice when there’s an unseen exam in the offing (“am I judging what level they’re at or what level I think they’ll get in the tests?”).
Anyway, be aware that the future of levels is not, at the time of writing, a done deal. There are, apparently, certain misgivings about their impact on teaching, progress and outcomes amongst some members of the expert review panel of the National Curriculum Programme of Study.
What might the alternatives be? Well, one way forward would be to have yearly teaching objectives – after all, the National Strategies produced these ten years ago in the original KS3 Science Framework. These would enable a clear indication of the expected coverage each year and would build progression in, clearly showing how ideas built on each other. What about assessment though? In the absence of levels does that become a Pass (proceed to next year) or Fail (repeat the year)? Motivating the repeaters might be somewhat of a challenge.
At the moment it’s all to play for; don’t regard it as being signed and sealed.
Ed Walsh
Science Advisor for Cornwall Learning
What the concept of levels provided was a clear focus on the relative complexity of ideas. Some concepts are more challenging than others and some skills are at a higher level. What the testing did was to provide a benchmark (and also to give students an experience of summative assessment). Although there was much relief at their demise, many schools still use them.
Both levels and the associated testing have pitfalls of course. Accepting that there is a hierarchy of concepts is easier than judging it and there was some questionable folklore in some cases about what constituted progression to higher levels. There was some consternation the year the tests included a question on balanced forces at a fairly basic level (“everyone knows that balanced forces are level 6”). The students weren’t in on the folklore of course and most, including quite a few who weren’t at Level 6, did well on it.
It’s also difficult for teachers to develop confidence in their own assessment practice when there’s an unseen exam in the offing (“am I judging what level they’re at or what level I think they’ll get in the tests?”).
Anyway, be aware that the future of levels is not, at the time of writing, a done deal. There are, apparently, certain misgivings about their impact on teaching, progress and outcomes amongst some members of the expert review panel of the National Curriculum Programme of Study.
What might the alternatives be? Well, one way forward would be to have yearly teaching objectives – after all, the National Strategies produced these ten years ago in the original KS3 Science Framework. These would enable a clear indication of the expected coverage each year and would build progression in, clearly showing how ideas built on each other. What about assessment though? In the absence of levels does that become a Pass (proceed to next year) or Fail (repeat the year)? Motivating the repeaters might be somewhat of a challenge.
At the moment it’s all to play for; don’t regard it as being signed and sealed.
Ed Walsh
Science Advisor for Cornwall Learning
Did you know? Notes from the history of Maths
Numbers Banned
Many Mathematics teachers will know the story of the murder of Hippasus of Metapontum around 500BCE for demonstrating that root 2 is irrational. The existence of such numbers challenged the Pythagorean world view that all was number (by which they meant measurable).
The recognition of different types of numbers has been an integral part of the development of our number system. Whilst in China negative numbers were recognised as early as 100BCE, Diophantus considered them absurd. Zero has been accepted in some form since at least 2000 BCE – though usually as a space or symbol just indicating ‘no number’. Brahmagupta, born in India 598 CE, was the first to treat 0 as an actual number. The word “zero” comes from the Arabic “sifr”. The Persian mathematician, Al-Khwārizmī, wrote a treatise in 825 on Hindu numerals which led, eventually, to their adoption in Europe with Fibonnacci’s help. “Sifr” is also the origin of the word “cipher”. Some think that there is a link between zero and codes as the Hindu-Arabic numbers originally had to be used secretly. The city of Florence banned their use in 1299. Perhaps, the concern was that the populace would find arithmetic too easy and this would erode the power of the educated elites.
Individual numbers have also been banned. From Roman times, a 6 x 6 magic square, using the numbers 1 to 36, was used as a talisman. The Church banned the possession of this magic square. The overall sum is 666 – the ‘number of the beast’ or the ‘anti-christ’. Fear of 666 has a name: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. US President Ronald Reagan had their house number in Los Angeles changed from 666 to 668.
In China, it is illegal to use 8964 as a pin code since it is the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre (4 June 1989). As recently January this year, Sony prosecuted George Holtz for showing how to by-pass Play Station security. Part of the lawsuit was that he published copyrighted numbers. It was illegal to know these numbers unless authorised. This is a strange idea – that someone can own a number!
Don Hoyle
Mathematics Teacher
Many Mathematics teachers will know the story of the murder of Hippasus of Metapontum around 500BCE for demonstrating that root 2 is irrational. The existence of such numbers challenged the Pythagorean world view that all was number (by which they meant measurable).
The recognition of different types of numbers has been an integral part of the development of our number system. Whilst in China negative numbers were recognised as early as 100BCE, Diophantus considered them absurd. Zero has been accepted in some form since at least 2000 BCE – though usually as a space or symbol just indicating ‘no number’. Brahmagupta, born in India 598 CE, was the first to treat 0 as an actual number. The word “zero” comes from the Arabic “sifr”. The Persian mathematician, Al-Khwārizmī, wrote a treatise in 825 on Hindu numerals which led, eventually, to their adoption in Europe with Fibonnacci’s help. “Sifr” is also the origin of the word “cipher”. Some think that there is a link between zero and codes as the Hindu-Arabic numbers originally had to be used secretly. The city of Florence banned their use in 1299. Perhaps, the concern was that the populace would find arithmetic too easy and this would erode the power of the educated elites.
Individual numbers have also been banned. From Roman times, a 6 x 6 magic square, using the numbers 1 to 36, was used as a talisman. The Church banned the possession of this magic square. The overall sum is 666 – the ‘number of the beast’ or the ‘anti-christ’. Fear of 666 has a name: Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia. US President Ronald Reagan had their house number in Los Angeles changed from 666 to 668.
In China, it is illegal to use 8964 as a pin code since it is the date of the Tiananmen Square massacre (4 June 1989). As recently January this year, Sony prosecuted George Holtz for showing how to by-pass Play Station security. Part of the lawsuit was that he published copyrighted numbers. It was illegal to know these numbers unless authorised. This is a strange idea – that someone can own a number!
Don Hoyle
Mathematics Teacher
Primary - Bread Making
As well as being great fun, bread making takes us back to the very basics of food production and to a time when a happy accident led to flour, contaminated with natural yeasts was left longer than usual on a warm day and began to rise. The cooked bread was found to be lighter and easier to eat and so a revolution in food was born.
Activity One - Looking at natural microbes
There are many microbes in the world around us which, in their quest for survival, feed off natural sugars and protein,s causing them to decay. These produce moulds and gases of which some are harmful and some are helpful.
The children can test for the presence of microbes around them by leaving bread, cheese and fruit out in the air, in a safe place, and note the changes that happen over the course of a few weeks. What we see is the microbes feeding off sugars and proteins and developing fruiting bodies which we call mould. Now mix some fresh or dried baker’s yeast with warm water and sugar and leave it somewhere warm but ventilated. After 30 minutes to an hour they should be able to observe frothing of the mixture and a pungent smell. These are caused by the production of carbon dioxide and alcohol in the process known as fermentation.
Now show the children a loaf of bread and slice it in half. What do they notice?
Ask them what they think caused the holes in bread. Keep referring to the froth on the yeast mixture and show them that when it is stirred, the bubbles disappear. Why doesn’t that happen with the bread?
Activity Two
As an introduction to bread making, read the children the story of the Little Red Hen. It illustrates beautifully the process of bread making from field to plate in order to show how cooperation can enable all to share in a reward for their combined efforts. From the book, ask the class to illustrate and label each stage of the process and display it around the class. Can they use the ideas from the book together with what they have learned to far to write instructions for the bread making process? There will be gaps but they can complete those later after the process has been completed.
Activity Three
You can also link the idea of bread making into the history topic of Invaders and Settlers.
Begin by asking the children what kinds of food invaders would eat and what kinds of food settlers would eat. Can they justify their choices with reference to how long each takes to produce? Early humans were nomadic and had a protein rich lifestyle as they killed animals from the flocks they herded or wild animals through hunting. As humans settled in hospitable areas they initially became gatherers and then found they could cultivate much of what they gathered. This meant that they would have to stay in the same place for as long as the crops took to grow and would need to spend time tending the crops during the growing season. One of the earliest cultivated crops was wheat and this was used to make bread.
Activity Four
Ask the children to bring in different kinds of bread. You may get wholemeal, granary, oatmeal, rye, soda, unleavened etc. Do an observation and taste test with them. Label headings on the board such as what it looks like, texture, size of holes/bubbles, taste, like or dislike. Be careful to check you have no celiac sufferers beforehand. Looking at the wrappers will tell them what is different about the ingredients or how it’s been cooked. From this you could discuss healthiness by looking at the nutritional information label on the bag and rank the breads in order of healthiness, deciding what it is about each bread that makes it healthy or unhealthy.
Activity Five
Making bread! Children love this and it’s easy and almost always successful. It’s even more fun when you go right back to the beginning and buy some whole wheat grains and mill them in a pestle and mortar. The children will see the white powder that is the flour and after sifting they’ll end up with nearly pure flour. This could take a very long time if you want to make all your flour this way so I’d recommend mixing some of your ground flour with commercial bread flour. At the same time you could sow some of the wheat grains in a pot or in the school garden to see how it grows.
Get the children to make us the yeast mixture as you showed them in the previous activity. It will begin frothing almost immediately and they’ll have to mix it with the flour and salt quickly. Once the dough leaves the sides of the bowl cleanly, ask the children to pick out the dough and begin kneading it. Ask them what they notice happening to the dough as they do this. The gluten in the flour is being released and making the dough stretchy. Once the dough is smooth and stretchy, put the dough back in the bowl and leave in a warm place to prove. An hour later ask the children what they notice and what has happened to the dough to make it rise. If you carefully cut a piece off using a sharp knife the children will be able to see the bubbles in the yeast. Ask them again if they can understand why the bubbles disappeared in the yeast mix yet stay in the dough. They’ll have to knead the dough again and then shape it to form their bread before proving it again. You can explain that this is to make sure the yeast and bubbles form evenly through the bread. Finally it’ll be ready for baking. Making one of your own with the children will earn you some kudos and you can use yours at the end of the activity to demonstrate the capture of the bubbles through the hardening of the dough through cooking.
Dave Lewis, Primary teacher
Activity One - Looking at natural microbes
There are many microbes in the world around us which, in their quest for survival, feed off natural sugars and protein,s causing them to decay. These produce moulds and gases of which some are harmful and some are helpful.
The children can test for the presence of microbes around them by leaving bread, cheese and fruit out in the air, in a safe place, and note the changes that happen over the course of a few weeks. What we see is the microbes feeding off sugars and proteins and developing fruiting bodies which we call mould. Now mix some fresh or dried baker’s yeast with warm water and sugar and leave it somewhere warm but ventilated. After 30 minutes to an hour they should be able to observe frothing of the mixture and a pungent smell. These are caused by the production of carbon dioxide and alcohol in the process known as fermentation.
Now show the children a loaf of bread and slice it in half. What do they notice?
Ask them what they think caused the holes in bread. Keep referring to the froth on the yeast mixture and show them that when it is stirred, the bubbles disappear. Why doesn’t that happen with the bread?
Activity Two
As an introduction to bread making, read the children the story of the Little Red Hen. It illustrates beautifully the process of bread making from field to plate in order to show how cooperation can enable all to share in a reward for their combined efforts. From the book, ask the class to illustrate and label each stage of the process and display it around the class. Can they use the ideas from the book together with what they have learned to far to write instructions for the bread making process? There will be gaps but they can complete those later after the process has been completed.
Activity Three
You can also link the idea of bread making into the history topic of Invaders and Settlers.
Begin by asking the children what kinds of food invaders would eat and what kinds of food settlers would eat. Can they justify their choices with reference to how long each takes to produce? Early humans were nomadic and had a protein rich lifestyle as they killed animals from the flocks they herded or wild animals through hunting. As humans settled in hospitable areas they initially became gatherers and then found they could cultivate much of what they gathered. This meant that they would have to stay in the same place for as long as the crops took to grow and would need to spend time tending the crops during the growing season. One of the earliest cultivated crops was wheat and this was used to make bread.
Activity Four
Ask the children to bring in different kinds of bread. You may get wholemeal, granary, oatmeal, rye, soda, unleavened etc. Do an observation and taste test with them. Label headings on the board such as what it looks like, texture, size of holes/bubbles, taste, like or dislike. Be careful to check you have no celiac sufferers beforehand. Looking at the wrappers will tell them what is different about the ingredients or how it’s been cooked. From this you could discuss healthiness by looking at the nutritional information label on the bag and rank the breads in order of healthiness, deciding what it is about each bread that makes it healthy or unhealthy.
Activity Five
Making bread! Children love this and it’s easy and almost always successful. It’s even more fun when you go right back to the beginning and buy some whole wheat grains and mill them in a pestle and mortar. The children will see the white powder that is the flour and after sifting they’ll end up with nearly pure flour. This could take a very long time if you want to make all your flour this way so I’d recommend mixing some of your ground flour with commercial bread flour. At the same time you could sow some of the wheat grains in a pot or in the school garden to see how it grows.
Get the children to make us the yeast mixture as you showed them in the previous activity. It will begin frothing almost immediately and they’ll have to mix it with the flour and salt quickly. Once the dough leaves the sides of the bowl cleanly, ask the children to pick out the dough and begin kneading it. Ask them what they notice happening to the dough as they do this. The gluten in the flour is being released and making the dough stretchy. Once the dough is smooth and stretchy, put the dough back in the bowl and leave in a warm place to prove. An hour later ask the children what they notice and what has happened to the dough to make it rise. If you carefully cut a piece off using a sharp knife the children will be able to see the bubbles in the yeast. Ask them again if they can understand why the bubbles disappeared in the yeast mix yet stay in the dough. They’ll have to knead the dough again and then shape it to form their bread before proving it again. You can explain that this is to make sure the yeast and bubbles form evenly through the bread. Finally it’ll be ready for baking. Making one of your own with the children will earn you some kudos and you can use yours at the end of the activity to demonstrate the capture of the bubbles through the hardening of the dough through cooking.
Dave Lewis, Primary teacher
Primary General - Fruit and Vegetables
Getting children to have ‘5-a-Day’, five portions of fruit and vegetable a day, is a thankless task and leads to many sticky moments in parenting and in the dinner queue at school! These fun activities will help children see that fruit and vegetables aren’t all poisonous and will encourage them to eat them more often.
Activity One
A tasting session is always a good start, challenge the children to bring in some unusual fruit or vegetables for the class to try. Put the children into groups to prepare the fruit and vegetables, some may need cooking but a quick zap in the staffroom microwave is often enough! Now draw a chart on the board with the headings ‘Name’, ‘Colour’, ‘Texture’, ‘Taste’ and ‘Like/Dislike’. Now ask the children to try all of the available fruit and vegetables. Have a bin handy just in case and check for allergies beforehand – strawberries are a common allergy. When the tasting session is over, use the plenary to ask if there were any fruit or vegetables the children hadn’t tried before and which they think they like and will have again. Were there any they thought they wouldn’t like but now they’ve tried them they do like them (remember my experiences in the school dinner line!!)?
Activity Two
Use the chart that accompanies this activity sheet for the children to take home to record their intake of fruit and vegetables each day. They can write on the chart what they had and with which meal or they can draw pictures of the fruit and vegetables. The visual nature of a chart will encourage them to eat more but beware of those who cheat!! Maybe an initial by each one from mum or dad might be necessary!
Activity Three
Time for some investigation now. Using the website http://www.dole.com/funfacts-chart4-8.html ask the children to look at their chart from activity one and select eight fruit or vegetables they liked. Thinking of the benefits of eating fruit and vegetables such as fibre source, vitamins and minerals ask them to sort their favourites into the categories on a chart highlighting the one that would come top in each category. Ask them to see if there is a superfood in their diet that comes top in more than one category. During the plenary put together a set of class superfoods that they have discovered in their research.
Activity Four
Time for some creativity now! The essence of a great chef is not just cooking the food to perfection but also in the presentation. The colours and shapes of fruit or vegetables can help children make brilliant art work. Ask them to plan what picture or pattern they would like to make and label their plan with the fruit or vegetable they will use. In the next lesson, ask them to bring in the fruit or vegetables they will need and, on a plate, arrange them to form the picture or pattern. The children may need some help with cutting but normal cutlery knives which aren’t sharp will usually suffice. Once the picture is complete, photograph it for a display (or the microbes will soon make a meal of it!) and then provided hygiene standards have been maintained, the children can eat their pictures!
Activity Five
Another great way to enjoy fruit or vegetables is via smoothies or soups. Ask the children to come up with ideas for a super smoothie or a super soup, listing the ingredients, naming it and drawing a serving suggestion for it. In the next session ask parents/children to bring in liquidisers, food processors or smoothie makers and the fruit and vegetables they need and after a safety talk, allow the children to make their own smoothies. Those who opt to make soup may need to bring in ready cooked vegetables or the process could be a lot more complicated! The sessiom could end with a ‘Battle of the Smoothies’ with a tasting session to decide which is the best one!
As an extension activity, the children could design an advertisement for their smoothie together with a catch phrase or a jingle. They could look at cartons from smoothie producers and design their own alternative packaging for their smoothie.
Activity Six
To end this set of activities you could arrange a ‘colour party’ where the children bring in fruit and vegetables of different colours. They could then use the website from activity three to see if there is a relationship between the colours of the vegetables and their nutritional value. Finally, encourage each child to try a piece of fruit or vegetable from each colour.
Dave Lewis, Primary teacher
Activity One
A tasting session is always a good start, challenge the children to bring in some unusual fruit or vegetables for the class to try. Put the children into groups to prepare the fruit and vegetables, some may need cooking but a quick zap in the staffroom microwave is often enough! Now draw a chart on the board with the headings ‘Name’, ‘Colour’, ‘Texture’, ‘Taste’ and ‘Like/Dislike’. Now ask the children to try all of the available fruit and vegetables. Have a bin handy just in case and check for allergies beforehand – strawberries are a common allergy. When the tasting session is over, use the plenary to ask if there were any fruit or vegetables the children hadn’t tried before and which they think they like and will have again. Were there any they thought they wouldn’t like but now they’ve tried them they do like them (remember my experiences in the school dinner line!!)?
Activity Two
Use the chart that accompanies this activity sheet for the children to take home to record their intake of fruit and vegetables each day. They can write on the chart what they had and with which meal or they can draw pictures of the fruit and vegetables. The visual nature of a chart will encourage them to eat more but beware of those who cheat!! Maybe an initial by each one from mum or dad might be necessary!
Activity Three
Time for some investigation now. Using the website http://www.dole.com/funfacts-chart4-8.html ask the children to look at their chart from activity one and select eight fruit or vegetables they liked. Thinking of the benefits of eating fruit and vegetables such as fibre source, vitamins and minerals ask them to sort their favourites into the categories on a chart highlighting the one that would come top in each category. Ask them to see if there is a superfood in their diet that comes top in more than one category. During the plenary put together a set of class superfoods that they have discovered in their research.
Activity Four
Time for some creativity now! The essence of a great chef is not just cooking the food to perfection but also in the presentation. The colours and shapes of fruit or vegetables can help children make brilliant art work. Ask them to plan what picture or pattern they would like to make and label their plan with the fruit or vegetable they will use. In the next lesson, ask them to bring in the fruit or vegetables they will need and, on a plate, arrange them to form the picture or pattern. The children may need some help with cutting but normal cutlery knives which aren’t sharp will usually suffice. Once the picture is complete, photograph it for a display (or the microbes will soon make a meal of it!) and then provided hygiene standards have been maintained, the children can eat their pictures!
Activity Five
Another great way to enjoy fruit or vegetables is via smoothies or soups. Ask the children to come up with ideas for a super smoothie or a super soup, listing the ingredients, naming it and drawing a serving suggestion for it. In the next session ask parents/children to bring in liquidisers, food processors or smoothie makers and the fruit and vegetables they need and after a safety talk, allow the children to make their own smoothies. Those who opt to make soup may need to bring in ready cooked vegetables or the process could be a lot more complicated! The sessiom could end with a ‘Battle of the Smoothies’ with a tasting session to decide which is the best one!
As an extension activity, the children could design an advertisement for their smoothie together with a catch phrase or a jingle. They could look at cartons from smoothie producers and design their own alternative packaging for their smoothie.
Activity Six
To end this set of activities you could arrange a ‘colour party’ where the children bring in fruit and vegetables of different colours. They could then use the website from activity three to see if there is a relationship between the colours of the vegetables and their nutritional value. Finally, encourage each child to try a piece of fruit or vegetable from each colour.
Dave Lewis, Primary teacher
Primary General - Making Pizza
Pizza is a food loved by most children and careful preparation of it can mean it’s a really healthy food. Pizza can also be used as the basis for many different lessons and here are some of the ways we’ve used pizza in lessons.
Activity One
If you’re doing a topic on Romans and the food they ate, you could look at the passage from Virgil’s Aeneid
Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour.
Ascanius this observ’d, and smiling said:
“See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”
Ask the children to think about what food might the people be eating when they eat their meal off ‘cakes of flour’ and then finally eat the plates!!
If they identify the food as pizza you could then introduce a pasty and discuss how it was used similarly by the Cornish miners. Calzone pizzas actually look similar to pasties anyway being a folded pizza with the filling inside. You could also introduce pita bread and show how a pita pocket was used similarly in middle eastern countries to hold a meal and then be consumed. In fact the word pizza is a corruption of ‘pita’. Ask if they can think of any other foods which wrap a meal in bread and they suggest sandwiches, which have an interesting history, wraps, tortillas, naan and parathas and many more!
Activity Two
Linking in pizzas to the science topic of healthy eating ask the children to tell you what food group a pizza base would belong to and then list the possible toppings that they might put on their favourite pizza.
Draw a food pyramid on the board and ask the children to add each topping to the food groups, so cheese would go in dairy, pepperoni would go in protein, tomatoi puree and tomato slices in fruit and vegetables.
Once you have completed the food pyramid of pizzas and their toppings ask the children to use it to design a balanced pizza thinking of healthy quantities. You could extend the activity by asking them to consider how the fat and salt content could be reduced or ways of improving the healthy qualities of the base.
Activity Three
Time to make our pizzas. Make sure hands and surfaces are washed beforehand and that an explanation of hygiene rules is given before they start otherwise the pizzas won’t be very healthy at all!! You could make a batch of dough beforehand for them to roll out and shape or get them to make the base themselves from flour, yeast and water. Before they add the toppings, discuss the order they go in and why that may be. Set groups of children to grate cheese, cut vegetables (care with knives). Originally there were only two types of pizza as we know them today, the marinara, named not because it had seafood on it but because it was made by fishermen’s wives and margherita, named after a visiting queen who wanted the pizza coloured in the flag of Italy, so red tomatoes, green basil and white mozzarella cheese!
Once the children have carefully made their pizzas they could be wrapped and sent home for cooking (store them in a fridge beforehand though!) or cooked and eaten in a Roman feast!
Activity Four
Pizzas are great for learning about fractions in mathematics. Using basic pizzas, cut them up into halves, quarters etc depending on the fractions being taught. You can use them very effectively to do simple fractions or to do mixed or improper fractions. Visually the children can easily identify that seven quarters make one whole and three quarters. They are also very good for doing addition and subtraction of fractions too and if you’re feeling really brave division of fractions where you might have four pizzas divided into sixths so twenty four sixths and share these between six people they’d have four sixths (or maybe visually two thirds) of a pizza each. This makes maths (and the tricky and potentially dull topic of fractions) exciting and motivational for the children and will guarantee that the lesson, and hopefully its objectives, will stay in their minds.
They can also be used in a shape and data extension by asking the children to consider why pizzas are round.
Dave Lewis, Primary teacher
Activity One
If you’re doing a topic on Romans and the food they ate, you could look at the passage from Virgil’s Aeneid
Their homely fare dispatch’d, the hungry band
Invade their trenchers next, and soon devour,
To mend the scanty meal, their cakes of flour.
Ascanius this observ’d, and smiling said:
“See, we devour the plates on which we fed.”
Ask the children to think about what food might the people be eating when they eat their meal off ‘cakes of flour’ and then finally eat the plates!!
If they identify the food as pizza you could then introduce a pasty and discuss how it was used similarly by the Cornish miners. Calzone pizzas actually look similar to pasties anyway being a folded pizza with the filling inside. You could also introduce pita bread and show how a pita pocket was used similarly in middle eastern countries to hold a meal and then be consumed. In fact the word pizza is a corruption of ‘pita’. Ask if they can think of any other foods which wrap a meal in bread and they suggest sandwiches, which have an interesting history, wraps, tortillas, naan and parathas and many more!
Activity Two
Linking in pizzas to the science topic of healthy eating ask the children to tell you what food group a pizza base would belong to and then list the possible toppings that they might put on their favourite pizza.
Draw a food pyramid on the board and ask the children to add each topping to the food groups, so cheese would go in dairy, pepperoni would go in protein, tomatoi puree and tomato slices in fruit and vegetables.
Once you have completed the food pyramid of pizzas and their toppings ask the children to use it to design a balanced pizza thinking of healthy quantities. You could extend the activity by asking them to consider how the fat and salt content could be reduced or ways of improving the healthy qualities of the base.
Activity Three
Time to make our pizzas. Make sure hands and surfaces are washed beforehand and that an explanation of hygiene rules is given before they start otherwise the pizzas won’t be very healthy at all!! You could make a batch of dough beforehand for them to roll out and shape or get them to make the base themselves from flour, yeast and water. Before they add the toppings, discuss the order they go in and why that may be. Set groups of children to grate cheese, cut vegetables (care with knives). Originally there were only two types of pizza as we know them today, the marinara, named not because it had seafood on it but because it was made by fishermen’s wives and margherita, named after a visiting queen who wanted the pizza coloured in the flag of Italy, so red tomatoes, green basil and white mozzarella cheese!
Once the children have carefully made their pizzas they could be wrapped and sent home for cooking (store them in a fridge beforehand though!) or cooked and eaten in a Roman feast!
Activity Four
Pizzas are great for learning about fractions in mathematics. Using basic pizzas, cut them up into halves, quarters etc depending on the fractions being taught. You can use them very effectively to do simple fractions or to do mixed or improper fractions. Visually the children can easily identify that seven quarters make one whole and three quarters. They are also very good for doing addition and subtraction of fractions too and if you’re feeling really brave division of fractions where you might have four pizzas divided into sixths so twenty four sixths and share these between six people they’d have four sixths (or maybe visually two thirds) of a pizza each. This makes maths (and the tricky and potentially dull topic of fractions) exciting and motivational for the children and will guarantee that the lesson, and hopefully its objectives, will stay in their minds.
They can also be used in a shape and data extension by asking the children to consider why pizzas are round.
Dave Lewis, Primary teacher
Tuesday, 1 November 2011
Secondary History - The reality of teaching in Mauritius
“I feel sorry for you.”
I remember that sentence all too well! Indeed, two and a half years later, these words still ring around in my head! What had I done? I’d left a good school in the UK where I’d felt quite at home and enjoyed six years of good results as Head of Department. Now I was here, in Mauritius, in the middle of the Indian Ocean at a young, but growing, International School, with the brief of setting up a history department from scratch.
The wise old sage who had uttered those words of warning was right. It was not going to be easy! Two years down the track however, I’ve managed to get somewhere. As I enter the last half-term of my contract and head back to a HoD position in London, I feel I’ve met my brief. But yes, it was not esay!
Despite Mauritius’ rich and varied history – think Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, dodos, slavery, sugar and indentured labourers – for reasons mostly political, this is not an island that likes to dwell on its past. In its desire to be the new Singapore, kids are encouraged to study Accounts and Business Studies, to repeat and not to question.
This is what I was up against – an island that doesn’t even offer History pre-Sixth Form in state schools and where parents of the students I was trying to win over remember dull lessons of endless dates. I remember the Biology teacher catching up with me in the Staff Room one day – I’d had to go to the capital, Port Louis, to sort out some red tape and he’d covered a lesson. “If I’d had history lessons like that, I would have become a history teacher and not a biology teacher.” I knew I was getting somewhere.
So, what is the moral of the tale? The message is there for us history teachers – loud and clear. Make it interesting, make it relevant and make sure your passion comes out in every lesson. I’d always believed this, but my Mauritian adventure taught me more than ever that we simply have to make our subject relevant – spell it out, we’re often so passionate about the subject as we teach it that we can’t see the wood for the trees. There is nothing more rewarding than parents coming up to you and saying they are sorry to hear you are leaving as their son/daughter loves your lessons.
A driving instructor would not get into a car with a novice driver and say “go on then, drive.” Sometimes we fall into this trap. We need to spell out to the students why this subject is important. For example, tell the students that they are not simply studying the Depression in the 1930s but they are seeing Economics in action - far preferable to the rather dull ‘theory’ they have to listen to in Economics lessons! By studying this period they can actually ‘see’ tariffs in action, protectionism, supply and demand, the social consequences of economic action etc. Tell them they are studying psychology, politics, sociology and philosophy too and they are hooked. They often don’t realise it. My IGCSE students are now convinced they are going to be the generation that solves all the problems caused by mistakes of the past – well, all except miserable Pravin of course. We all teach a miserable Pravin – through studying International Relations modules, he’s convinced wars and conflicts are inevitable and we can’t avoid them. Still got some work to do with him, but nonetheless his arguments are well supported so that’s something. His face was a delight when I told him “As long as you can support it, you’re entitled to any view you want!”
Good resources are important too – and in a remote Indian Ocean island getting hands on good textbooks cheaply and quickly was not easy. Most worksheets I produced myself. This had the beneficial result that I was more comfortable teaching the lesson and I could include things more relevant to Africa and the Indian Ocean. I’m afraid to say that ‘official’ histories of Mauritius are turgid to say the least and as they are written by the Hindu majority, they often, shall we say, overlook the Creole minority’s contribution to the island’s development. Someone needs to produce a truly international IGCSE textbook – they would make a killing! (Must get round to doing the IGCSE version of Ben Walsh’s ‘Bible’...)
Getting that scheme of work right is not easy either – I found a balance of the local and the international to work well. A mix of skills work and knowledge work is essential too. Schemes of work can also lead to a dilemma at times too – do I skip topics because they are ‘boring’? Interestingly Henry VIII seems to be a winner wherever you are in the world! To return to a theme – if you can deliver it in an interesting, relevant and fun way, you’ve cracked it.
All good practitioners will know the importance of getting to know the students and like all of us, I quickly identified the ‘rebellious’ students who actually enjoyed it when I told them I wanted them to argue back. “How many lessons a week do you have where the teachers wants you to argue with them?” I asked. Answer came there: none.
As I alluded to earlier, for too long my beloved subject has been taught as an absolutist subject. For me, we are far more relativist and that’s how it should be. Socrates and his students at the Lyceum asked questions, most of these questions had no answers, yet much more knowledge was gained in the asking of the question!
As The Beatles once sang, its been a ‘long and winding road’ but I’m happy with what has been achieved out here in the baking sun. It may seem obvious but we’re often too busy trying to meet targets or produce something for yet another meeting that we can overlook it. Remember the mantra – keep it interesting, show why it's relevant, keep it fun!
Joe Wilkinson
Head of History
Northfields International High School, Mauritius
I remember that sentence all too well! Indeed, two and a half years later, these words still ring around in my head! What had I done? I’d left a good school in the UK where I’d felt quite at home and enjoyed six years of good results as Head of Department. Now I was here, in Mauritius, in the middle of the Indian Ocean at a young, but growing, International School, with the brief of setting up a history department from scratch.
The wise old sage who had uttered those words of warning was right. It was not going to be easy! Two years down the track however, I’ve managed to get somewhere. As I enter the last half-term of my contract and head back to a HoD position in London, I feel I’ve met my brief. But yes, it was not esay!
Despite Mauritius’ rich and varied history – think Portuguese, Dutch, French, British, dodos, slavery, sugar and indentured labourers – for reasons mostly political, this is not an island that likes to dwell on its past. In its desire to be the new Singapore, kids are encouraged to study Accounts and Business Studies, to repeat and not to question.
This is what I was up against – an island that doesn’t even offer History pre-Sixth Form in state schools and where parents of the students I was trying to win over remember dull lessons of endless dates. I remember the Biology teacher catching up with me in the Staff Room one day – I’d had to go to the capital, Port Louis, to sort out some red tape and he’d covered a lesson. “If I’d had history lessons like that, I would have become a history teacher and not a biology teacher.” I knew I was getting somewhere.
So, what is the moral of the tale? The message is there for us history teachers – loud and clear. Make it interesting, make it relevant and make sure your passion comes out in every lesson. I’d always believed this, but my Mauritian adventure taught me more than ever that we simply have to make our subject relevant – spell it out, we’re often so passionate about the subject as we teach it that we can’t see the wood for the trees. There is nothing more rewarding than parents coming up to you and saying they are sorry to hear you are leaving as their son/daughter loves your lessons.
A driving instructor would not get into a car with a novice driver and say “go on then, drive.” Sometimes we fall into this trap. We need to spell out to the students why this subject is important. For example, tell the students that they are not simply studying the Depression in the 1930s but they are seeing Economics in action - far preferable to the rather dull ‘theory’ they have to listen to in Economics lessons! By studying this period they can actually ‘see’ tariffs in action, protectionism, supply and demand, the social consequences of economic action etc. Tell them they are studying psychology, politics, sociology and philosophy too and they are hooked. They often don’t realise it. My IGCSE students are now convinced they are going to be the generation that solves all the problems caused by mistakes of the past – well, all except miserable Pravin of course. We all teach a miserable Pravin – through studying International Relations modules, he’s convinced wars and conflicts are inevitable and we can’t avoid them. Still got some work to do with him, but nonetheless his arguments are well supported so that’s something. His face was a delight when I told him “As long as you can support it, you’re entitled to any view you want!”
Good resources are important too – and in a remote Indian Ocean island getting hands on good textbooks cheaply and quickly was not easy. Most worksheets I produced myself. This had the beneficial result that I was more comfortable teaching the lesson and I could include things more relevant to Africa and the Indian Ocean. I’m afraid to say that ‘official’ histories of Mauritius are turgid to say the least and as they are written by the Hindu majority, they often, shall we say, overlook the Creole minority’s contribution to the island’s development. Someone needs to produce a truly international IGCSE textbook – they would make a killing! (Must get round to doing the IGCSE version of Ben Walsh’s ‘Bible’...)
Getting that scheme of work right is not easy either – I found a balance of the local and the international to work well. A mix of skills work and knowledge work is essential too. Schemes of work can also lead to a dilemma at times too – do I skip topics because they are ‘boring’? Interestingly Henry VIII seems to be a winner wherever you are in the world! To return to a theme – if you can deliver it in an interesting, relevant and fun way, you’ve cracked it.
All good practitioners will know the importance of getting to know the students and like all of us, I quickly identified the ‘rebellious’ students who actually enjoyed it when I told them I wanted them to argue back. “How many lessons a week do you have where the teachers wants you to argue with them?” I asked. Answer came there: none.
As I alluded to earlier, for too long my beloved subject has been taught as an absolutist subject. For me, we are far more relativist and that’s how it should be. Socrates and his students at the Lyceum asked questions, most of these questions had no answers, yet much more knowledge was gained in the asking of the question!
As The Beatles once sang, its been a ‘long and winding road’ but I’m happy with what has been achieved out here in the baking sun. It may seem obvious but we’re often too busy trying to meet targets or produce something for yet another meeting that we can overlook it. Remember the mantra – keep it interesting, show why it's relevant, keep it fun!
Joe Wilkinson
Head of History
Northfields International High School, Mauritius
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