Do you want to help students carry on participating in British Science Week at home, but are unsure how?
Here are our top tips for engaging parents/carers with the Week:
- Make the most of parent newsletters, the Parent-Teacher Association (PTA) and chat group and text messaging services if you have them. Let all the parents/carers know at least a month in advance of the Week what you have planned, and how you’d like them to be involved. They might be able to collect or donate materials for use during the Week, and if you want them to get involved in any experiments at home they may need time to plan and collect materials themselves. The PTA may be able to support you financially to run activities during the Week or help to drum up parent volunteers.
- Get parents/carers thinking about how their own jobs or hobbies might link to STEM subjects and encourage them to chat with their children/teenagers about this. You could do this via a newsletter or send students home with activities they can do with their parents/carers, which may then lead to further conversations.
- Encourage exploring outdoors, in the community or in local cultural spots. This could be anything from going on a nature walk around local parks to spotting STEM in action on the streets around students’ homes.
- You might want to check out the free resources available through CREST Awards. The Star and SuperStar activities have been designed for early years and primary aged children and many can be done in an outdoor setting. Check out the CREST primary challenges collection: https://primarylibrary.crestawards.org/. Projects in the secondary collection, particularly the Bronze Award projects, are suitable for 11-14 year olds and many could be run at home: https://secondarylibrary.crestawards.org/#Bronze.
- Send an experiment idea home during the Week to perhaps spark discussions around science. Try to make it as low-resource as possible. It can help if it’s something the students have tried or seen at school first so that they feel like the ‘experts’ when they do it at home with family, allowing them to lead the learning.
- Some of the activities in the activity packs have been adapted to be easily run at home, so they are a great place to start! There are a range of science-based home activities requiring few resources in the CREST Home learning collection: https://collectionslibrary.crestawards.org/#tab_ethICKF5NwsMjQq8.