At St Thomas’ we vision for science is to provide pupils with exciting opportunities to develop their scientific enquiries, while encouraging their natural curiosity of the world around them. Through high quality teaching of key knowledge of the scientific topics and through the progression of their ‘working scientifically’ skills, we aim to build on their conceptual understanding, allowing them to ask and answer their own questions.

We encourage pupils to be enquiry based leaners, devising their own experiments, therefore becoming confident and successful young scientist.

Children will be encouraged to work both independently and as a team to investigate and explore as practically as possible throughout each science unit. Whilst our science curriculum covers all aspects of the National Curriculum, it has been structured in a way to allow for meaningful cross-curricular links to be optimised and to enable children to learn in context.

All lessons are carefully scaffolded. This means teachers plan activities that enable the objective to be learned by all children including those who will find the objective challenging, those children who with hard work will secure good progress and those children who can tackle extra stretch and challenge in this subject.

They will participate in a sequence of lessons with a scientific focus, producing a range of evidence including written work.

Children will be able to ask and answer a range of questions linked to biology, chemistry and physics, using their answers to link to situations in the real world.

Children will gain an understanding of all key aspects of chemistry, biology and physics.

Children will be able to demonstrate an understanding of a fair test, to an age-appropriate level, and following key enquiry questions, know the fundamental principles of meaningful science. They will know that Scientists ideas have developed over time and study important scientists across chemistry, biology and physics.

St Thomas' have been awarded the Primary Science Quality Mark

Primary Science Quality Marks have been awarded to over 300 nursery, infant, junior, primary, middle, international and special schools this month to celebrate their commitment to excellence in science leadership, teaching and learning.

So far, since its national launch in 2010, more than 5000 Primary Science Quality Marks (PSQM) have been awarded, creating a solid foundation of quality science education for over 1,000,000 children.

PSQM is a comprehensive evidence-based professional development programme that effectively develops science leadership, ensuring teachers have the knowledge, capability and support they need to transform science education and shape future generations.

 Zavier's prize winning invention has won again.

Zavier's invention was first awarded a winner two years ago, before then winning further to have his inventions actually made by a group of engineers.

This same invention has now gone further, this week, to win the GOLD prize at the Primary Engineer MacRobert Medal awards.

Well done Zavier!

Science week 2024

Congratulations to all the students who entered the 'If I were an Engineer..' competition again this year.

And to our two Highly Commended winners, Alessia (Y5) and Evalyn (Y2).

This year the topic for Science week was Time.

We ran a whole school investigation with the question:

Does age affect reaction time?

Science Week 2023

Following on from our winning entry last year, I am even more excited to announce that this year we have had 3 highly commended entries and 2 winners!

Massive congratulations to:

Year 1 – Yuri P – Highly Commended

Year 3 – Kiril Z – Highly Commended

Year 5 – Fernanda C – Highly Commended

and to our winners:

Year 2 – Louis J – Winner

Year 3 – Isabel C – Winner

All entrants will be awarded their certificates and awards at a special ceremony at Canterbury University.

Also at the same ceremony Zavier (last year's winner) will be seeing his creation for the first time, as his invention was chosen by a team of engineers to be made into a prototype.

CONGRATULATIONS EVERYONE!

Science Week 2022

As part of science week the children were asked to create their own invention for the If I were an engineer competition. They could invent anything, but generally they thought about things that would help those around them.

We are so pleased to say that this year we had some outstanding entries and have had a record amount make the finals out of all the schools in the South-East of England.