“Tell me and I'll forget, show me and I'll remember, involve me and I'll understand.”
- Confucius (Chinese philosopher)
Inquiry-based learning is becoming increasingly popular, as the many proven benefits get harder to ignore. For a start, through research students become more engaged with the subject, curious about areas where their knowledge is lacking and overall, more enthusiastic about learning. But, despite this, many teachers are struggling to bring inquiry-based activities into their classrooms. Not only do these activities take much longer to find, prepare, execute and evaluate, but many primary school teachers have no background in science and can find scientific topics daunting to tackle.
So, how can we help? UNAWE is now renovating our entire repository of activity guides, to make them as clear, accessible and self-contained as possible! We've already got 10 activities online, all of which have been checked for educational and scientific content, and evaluated to make sure they meet the highest standards. We cover a wide range of topics, from optics to habitability, magnetism to the Sun-Moon-Earth system, and much more!
The activities are easy to search through using keywords, and information such as time-scale, age range, cost, necessary materials and level of supervision in included to make planning and execution as simple as possible. Each activity includes an easy step-by-step walk through that can be used by teachers or students, plus no prior scientific knowledge of the topic is needed at all; all necessary background science is provided in the guide.
To help teachers justify these activities during school classes, a link to the national curriculum has been included where possible and all activities include learning objectives. Evaluation questions to test the students knowledge or discussion suggestions can also be found in several of the guides.
On top of all this, each activity is available under a creative commons license, in a range of formats, for ease of use, adaptation and translation. Download a print-ready PDF or an electronic book (ePub) to use on your tablet or smartphone (compatible with iOS, Android and Windows Phone).
You can find all Universe Awareness activities at www.unawe.org/activity/
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