Five new things about Explorify

We hope that you have settled into the new school year and are enjoying getting to know your class.

To get your class talking why not try our popular Zoom In, Zoom Out and Odd One Out activities. As well as starting some brilliant science lessons they can help you establish great relationships too.

But do you know there are five helpful new features on Explorify?

1. Possible misconceptions are now highlighted in the Background Science. Children might think, for example, that whales are fish.  So our helpful watch out for section signals these ahead.  You don’t have to correct them during your brief Explorify sessions, but it’s a good idea to return to them later.

2. Clued-up for the Climate Challenge? Explorify is. We’ve trawled through our resources and highlighted all those which will help you to teach children about climate issues. Look out for the new polar bear icon as you search for an activity: a blue background = Global Warming; green = Biodiversity Loss; and grey = Pollution. There’s also a series of three blogs explaining how it all works:

• Part 1A: What is the Climate Challenge and why teach it? 

• Part 1B: How does it links to the UK curricula?

• Part 2: How can we avoid children’s climate anxiety?

Each Explorify Climate Challenge activity suggests a small positive action that will enable children to feel they’re contributing to the solution.

3. Bringing children’s experiences centre stage is the aim of our new Have You Ever? activities which are available across every science topic, based on the Primary Science Capital project.  Have you ever been told to eat more fruit and vegetables? Have you ever had a favourite toy that broke? These questions will prove ideal when you start out on something new - valuing the children’s everyday experiences and making science learning more relatable, especially to those who don’t normally think of themselves as science-y. Encourage those children to become your experts! Tops tips for Have You Ever? are available here.

4. Make Explorify your ‘GO TO’ for CPD with our Planning Support Sessions, covering everything from Plants to Forces. In each session, there’s a short video and an accompanying PDF, which you can download – a document that is (figuratively, if not literally!) worth its weight in gold. Find your curriculum objective – English, Welsh, Scottish and Northern Irish – and listed with it will be all the related Explorify activities, along with suggestions for what children might do to follow up, whether in the classroom or out-of-doors. Here's an example PDF for Living things and their habitats, ages 7-11.

5. Good stuff keeps getting better. Links to great activities, tried-and-tested by teachers, are included with all our activities. New activities drop regularly onto the site, like the Odd One Out Give it a pull and, another Odd One Out, What is inside flowers?  One shows magnetism acting at a distance, the other helps children identify parts of flowers and their functions (both Year 3 objectives).  Or check out a new Zoom In, Zoom Out like Star-shaped survivor which enables Year 6 to take a closer look at a fascinating fossil.

There’s plenty more ahead so be sure to follow our regular blog posts here.