Brilliant British Science Week

Now in its third decade, our pupils at Truro School Prep proudly celebrated British Science Week with the exciting theme of ‘Change and Adapt’.

Science is an integral part of the curriculum at Truro School Prep and is taught as a discrete lesson from Pre-Prep. Years 3 to 6 have a dedicated science time of three lessons timetabled every week, so the progression we see in our pupils is outstanding. Our pupils perform significantly above the national average in standardised tests across each year group, with some of the Key Stage 3 curriculum being taught to our Prep pupils. Science also bubbles over into other subjects, like DT, cookery and extra-curricular clubs.

With a dedicated science lab at Truro School Prep, much emphasis is placed on experimental work, and British Science Week was no exception. With the theme of change and adapt in mind, our Year 6 classes explored adaptation in a range of exciting lessons that included ‘evolving’ their very own plasticine animals.

Our Year 4 classes picked up this theme with a fun playground game that replicated the concept of survival of the fittest. In our experiment, the pupils pretended to be black rats or white rats in a game of tag.

In this case, the black rats had the advantageous trait of being able to run, but the white rats could only walk. When a ‘rat’ was tagged, they became a rat of the opposite colour.

Due to their advantageous characteristic of being able to run, the black rats were able to more easily tag the white rats. As the game progressed, pupils were able to see that the advantageous characteristic became increasingly more important as the black rats became more prevalent. 

Our Year 3 pupils were looking at the changes that happen during seed germination and plant growth, while our Cookery sessions explored the changes made in meringues and cinder toffee (with some delicious results to take home as well).