The advantage to Fyling Hall’s Junior School in being attached to the Senior School (or to be more precise, attached directly to the science labs) is that we can invite various classes up for extra special sessions. This is in addition to the transition day for Year 6 and the experience days for visiting Year 5s that we do too.

One such recent opportunity was for last year’s year 4s to have a term of science in the Physics lab, using the equipment there to study electricity. 

At the end of the term all of years 4, 5 and 6 came up for even more unusual sessions I ran called ‘The history of computing and how computers work’. They were given a glimpse inside the computer’s case and we discussed how they have changed and changed our society over the past few decades. This lead us to guess as to how they will change what we do and how we do it in the future.

Using my suite of retro commodore VIC20 computers that I’ve re-furbished they wrote a simple program. I also teased them with the new equipment I have built around my Raspberry pi microcomputers, giving them a glimpse into what sort of exciting projects we could be doing in the senior school when they arrive: could we set up a wildlife infra-red camera in a bat box or watch birds eggs hatch? Could we build a weather monitoring system or a variety of different robots to do different tasks?

I believe it’s a valuable experience to have these previews of forthcoming attractions. Having the Junior School interacting with the Senior School in this way helps to join the dots of their learning and see that the path ahead is clear and their future is bright.

By Ayd Instone

Head of Physics, Head of Enrichment and Extra-Curricular