British Science Week 2025

The Science Ambassadors led a whole-school assembly to introduce this year’s British Science Week theme, ‘Change and Adapt’. They provided an insightful overview of the theme and explained that our school-wide scientific investigation will focus on germination. As part of this initiative, students will have the opportunity to develop their own enquiry questions and design experiments, fostering curiosity and scientific thinking.

Here are some of the experiments that took place across the school this week. We explored 'Change and Adaption' through a variety of tasks and investigations.

Ash class:

Animal adaptions - We explored some of the remarkable adaptions that allow animals to thrive in different habitats around the world. We then created our own type of animals by carefully selecting their body parts to help them survive in an environment of our choice (rainforests, oceans, polar regions and deserts).

Playground game adaptions - We considered how games can be adapted to include children with disabilities. We learnt about the effects of limited vision and other disabilities and designed games that accommodated the needs of different players.

Should we flush it? We explored which items can change and breakdown easily in water so it can be flushed away.

We discussed some items we would consider flushing down the toilet before designing our own experiment to test whether these items would be suitable. We filled bottles with water and used these as our drain pipes. We then inserted the items one at a time and mimicked the motion of water flowing through the pipes to see whether the material changed.

Oak class:

Germination Investigation – In this activity, the children created their own enquiry questions based on germination. The children decided which bean/seed to plan, in which conditions and what to ‘water’ it with. Some children chose to compare how plants germinate with and without air, some chose to see how beans/seeds germinate in different growing environments e.g. soil, sand, cotton wool and some children chose to ‘water’ the plant with a different liquid (such as milk or washing up liquid) to see how that affected the germination process.

Dissolving Dilemma – In this activity, children tried to set up a fair test to see which type of sugar would dissolve in water fastest. We tested granulated sugar, caster sugar and sugar cubes in the same volume of water. The children had to practise observing over time skills too to watch and time how quickly each sugar dissolved in water.

Music Makers – In this activity, children filled glass bottles with different volumes of liquid and investigated how the pitch changed depending on the volume. They tried tapping the glass bottles with different tools to see how this changed the sound too. Year 4 were able to link this to our Science topic as they understand that sound travels through vibrations.

Animal Adaptations – In this lesson, the children researched different animals to find out how they have adapted to live in different habitats.

Rowan class:

British Science Week 2025 home projects

Create a project for British Science Week, the theme for which is ‘Change and adapt’.  The brief is:

Consider a particular area of Science.  How has this adapted to the changes of the world?

You could explore how organisms and systems have adapted to different environments, including animal adaptions, plant adaptions, human innovations, climate change and even technology changes over time, all with a focus on the concept of change and adaption.  

Stargazing Night 29.01.25

We held a stargazing night to learn all about constellations, planets and more! We had expert guidance from a Cambridge University astronomy enthusiast. We also enjoyed a variety of activities including making constellation telescopes, planet mnemonics, exploring the phases of the moon with oreos and going on a solar system fact hunt.

Of course the main event was exploring the stars outside. Although it was a cloudy night, we used apps on our devices to spot visible planets and stars. We also got to look through a telescope and binoculars.

Professor Bubbleworks!

June 14th 2019: Ash Class entered their super observational drawings of mini beasts and colourful depictions of the butterflies seen in our wildlife area during a recent 'bug hunt' into the 2019 Bug Hunt competition. Some of our entries are shown below.

One of our lovely butterflies.

Here are some photos of the children collecting specimens for their drawings.

We are delighted to announce that KPA has been awarded  PSQM GILT.

British Science Week 11.3.19

Many thanks to Bobby and Johnny from Lockheed Martin for their eggstremely eggciting start to our Science Week! The session started with some really exciting videos showing the company’s involvement in, among other things, the Civil Space industry and their development of Mars Space Landers. Bobby and Johnny then introduced today’s challenge - we had to build a ‘Space Lander’ capable of landing and working on Mars, like their new Insight Mars lander; but instead of a precious Mars rover for cargo, our lander would carry an EGG! Pupils had just over 40 min to design their lander before the ‘big build’ - when their Egg Lander would be created. Rowan class had the additional task of having to build their craft to a tight, £150 million budget! All landers were then tested to the highest possible criteria (Johnny on a step ladder in the playground). Prizes were awarded to all groups who built Egg Landers capable of landing their precious cargo safely and there was a small reward for those who came up with a very eggspensive egg scrambler!  We couldn’t have asked for a better start to our Science Week. See (mainly) Rowan class photos below. Oak class photos to follow. 

Tuesday 12th of February, 2019

Curiosity club enjoyed investigating what happened when you add bicarbonate of soda to vinegar - they discovered that the resultant gas (CO2) inflated the balloons! The group hope to share their investigation with the rest of school next week during a science pop-up session at lunch time.