Nuffield Review

Nuffield Primary Science: Key Stage 2
Primary Science Review 29, October 1993
Anne Goldsworthy

All right you can unbate your breath; the waiting is over. Nuffield Primary Science has arrived and it is every bit as good as we hoped it might be.

This is the scheme which is based on the SPACE (Science Processes and Concept Exploration) research into children's ideas about the world around them. Its central premise is that children will only learn effectively if we find out their ideas, value what they say to us and then give them experiences which enable them to extend or change their ideas. It should be hard to argue against that premise but as a classroom teacher, struggling to keep your head above the National Curriculum waters, you need straightforward practical advice on how to make that idea work in your classroom. This scheme offers you just that.

So, what sort of advice would you need? Firstly, you would want to know the key ideas that you intend to teach and what questions to ask and activities to set up, to enable you to get at your children's thinking. Check! They're there. Next you would like some idea of the likely response that children will give you based on sound research. Check! That's there as well. Now, most importantly, you need to know what activities to do with the children to challenge or extend their thinking. Check it off! It's all there. Of course, it would be wonderful if next to the suggestions for activities there were also indications of good opportunities for investigations and the use of IT, reminders of important scientific ideas, occasions when children should discuss new vocabulary, safety warnings, equipment lists and links to the pupil background reading books. Check, check, check, check, check! Add to all this a chapter on assessment, which uses examples of children's work rather than narrow criteria-driven worksheets and another section giving excellent background knowledge for the teacher which is neither condescendingly simplistic nor full of jargon, and you have some idea of the range and quality of these books.

Not only is the content first rate, the lay-out is also clear and user-friendly. I looked at the sample of books listed at the head of this review. In all, there are 11 teachers' guides for KS2, one for most strands of National Curriculum. (Light and Sound are given a unit each, whereas the two strands in Sc3 are grouped together to make one unit on Materials). These form the backbone of the scheme and have been greeted with appreciative comments whenever I have shown them to teachers. There are also accompanying pupil books, 11 for years 3-4 and 11 for years 5-6, which contain such things as stimulating pictures and questions, poetry, data and interesting facts. These would be particularly useful for extending the thinking of the more able pupils and for group discussions. The Teachers' Handbook gives further details on the whole SPACE approach.

Twenty years ago, when I was at college, I was struck by this line in one of Douglas Barnes' books: 'In the end, we can only work with their [the children's] meanings'. It seemed such good advice that I tried to incorporate it into my teaching wherever I could, but often found myself wondering how to find out their meanings and what on earth I should do once I had the information. Now, at last, Nuffield Primary Science supplies the answer. Scrape together the pennies and buy it as soon as you can.

Curriculum support materials consist of 11 teachers' guides at each of KS1 and KS2 covering different topics such as Materials and Forces.

There is one pupils' book to match each teachers' guide at KS1 and two books (one for each of Years 3-4 and 5-6) to match each teachers' guide at KS2.

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