STEM Week - April 2019
Lesson: Science
Class: Year 4H Year: 2018 - 2019
At the beginning of the week, we read the Bible Story Genesis 3. This story starts in the Garden of Eden and is called The beginning of Sin. In this, Adam and Eve are in the Garden of Eden. God tells them that they can eat fruit from any of the trees apart from the large one in the middle. A snake tells Eve to go ahead and eat from the tree despite God’s commandment. Eve is tempted and she goes against God. We wondered why she had decided to do this so we investigated in Science whether senses affect our temptation?
We tasted some baked beans. This of us that liked them thought they were lovely. We then took away people’s sight by blind folding them.
We wanted to find out if what children heard about the food would put them off. This also allowed us to see if the blindfolded children were affected by what they heard The other children shouted in horror when they saw green baked beans and green custard arrive in the classroom. The blindfolded children were a little unsure but bravely accepted the challenge: finding out that we should try not to rely on just one of our senses. We concluded that our senses have a massive impact on whether or not we can resist temptation.
Later on, we conducted an experiment based on the famous Rowntree’s Fruit Pastille adverts about how long we could have a sweet in our mouths before being tempted to chew.
The challenge faced was to see how long can you do before you chew! This used Maths skills to measure and record timings, collating data from the table and posing further question we could investigate. Year 4 were very good at resisting the temptation to chew.
After this, we used technology to record adverts, pretending we were the snake, to tempt Eve to try the fruit from the tree, just as the adverts had tempted people to take on the no chewing challenge. Children recorded thinking about camera angles and close ups etc. Some children even found appropriate music to accompany their different characters.
Finally, we used engineering and designing to put around the trees we had made to help Eve resist her temptation. We made a circuit containing a trip switch so that a buzzer or security light would go off if anyone went near the tree.
