Stop The Spread

Last week, we welcomed the children back with the traditional start-of-term STEAM day. Always a popular way to kick off a new term, this term’s challenge saw the children tackling the ever-important need to ‘Stop the Spread’ of germs and diseases.

In the morning the children completed a range of experiments, including learning how soap works and using glitter to demonstrate how easily germs can be spread if we don’t follow our basic sanitation guide of catch it, bin it, kill it! Despite the smiles and laughter as the children watched the glitter germs easily pass around the classes, it was evident to see the realisation hit home of just how easily germs can be spread and the importance of being able to wash our hands properly.

This then led the children to plan, design and build a hand-washing device, which could harness rainwater to provide a means of sanitation for people living in deprived areas. We certainly have some future designers and engineers in our school! Year 5 and 6 pupils were also given the bonus challenge of designing an educational resource to go along with their model, which saw one Year 6 team produce a working hand-washing game using the Scratch programme on their Surface Gos!

A STEAM day would not be complete without Mr Groves being on hand to help the children test their final designs. He always seems to be particularly keen if it includes the opportunity to liberally hose down several children under the guise of thoroughly testing their models!

With children transferring the skills learned from one STEAM day to the next, their ability to think through logical solutions and build strong and stable models has really developed, and the designs created during this challenge were outstanding.