Biodiversity unit-Paradise Pastures: A Story-Inspired, Science Enquiry in your School Grounds

This series of lessons uses the Eden Project’s Story-Inspired Learning approach to connect children with the biodiversity in their own school grounds and develop their understanding of the nature and process of scientific enquiry.

https://www.edenproject.com/learn/schools/teaching-resources

Overview of the lesson series
At Eden we use stories as starting points (hooks) and play on children’s natural curiosity to engage our learners. The human brain is hardwired for engaging with storytelling. The ‘Paradise Pastures’ lesson series demonstrate how we take this playful, narrative-led approach and apply this to scientific enquiry. This series of immersive sessions would be best delivered during the summer term. The sessions begin with a period of exploration where the children touch on a range of enquiry types, skills and areas of science knowledge and understanding, and have a range of science experiences outdoors. These experiences act to spark their curiosity.

Key to this lesson series is the idea that science enquiry is about much more than carrying out a ‘fair test’. There are actually 6 types of scientific enquiry: Observation over time, Researching, Identifying, Classifying and Grouping, Pattern Seeking, Problem Solving and Fair/Comparative testing. Once we come to realise and become practised in these different and equally valid ways of ‘finding out’, beyond trying to shoehorn everything into a ‘fair test’, then teachers and their children have more freedom to enjoy the nature of science.

To find out further information about the types of scientific enquiry and the enquiry skills we recommend visiting the Primary Science Teaching Trust website.

After these initial exploratory sessions, the students are encouraged to draw on their experiences and to develop their own scientific question: something which they themselves have become curious about. They are then supported to choose the most suitable enquiry type to investigate their question and complete an investigation before reporting back their findings.

The investigations take place within your school grounds in an area which will come to be known as ‘Paradise Pastures’. It’s likely that the children will already be familiar with the place, however, this series of lessons invites them to take another look at that place and explore it with a fresh focus.