Science Week in the Junior School

By Jon Craddock, Year 3 Teacher

The Radford Junior School participated in National Science Week in many ways, celebrating science with local guest scientists, teachers and students from the Senior School, as well as year group science stations.

Dr Graham Walker kicked off Science Week presenting his Science Shows to the Junior School. Dr Walker is well-known for his ability to create an engaging and entertaining environment that communicates deep scientific knowledge, clearly and simply. It was a fantastic day, with students seeing a variety of explosions and reactions from chemicals and forces.

Throughout Science Week, students in Years 2, 3 and 4 also had an opportunity to take an excursion to the Science labs in the Secondary School. An enormous “thank you” to Tracey Craze, Chris Main and Stephanie Comino, along with three boys from Year 12 – Heath Shaw, Kynan Swan and Malachi Quach – who completed many experiments with the students throughout the week. They saw fire, dry ice in action, chemical reactions, and many more fun scientific experiments, and heard some terrific explanations.

Finally, Dr Brad Tucker gave up his time to come and speak to the Years 3 to 6 students. Dr Tucker explored the universe, space, moon phases, and how we explore space with cube satellites. He also discussed the recent and upcoming rocket launches. Students were filled with questions and wonderings and were totally engaged throughout his talk. Some were even venturing into the multiverse theories. We are very lucky to have Dr Brad Tucker as a parent and our local astrophysicist. Thank you, Dr Tucker for all your energy, knowledge, and the time you give up in sharing with us.

Here are some responses from students describing their experiences from Science Week 2022.

Today 2LM watched a science show by Dr Graham. I loved when I got to stand on six balloons with six people, how crazy was that! What do you wonder would happen to the balloons? Will they pop or not pop? Well they didn’t pop because they were sharing the same amount of space.

Loretta Dai – 2LM

Today we watched a Science show by Dr Graham. He talked about fractions which we are learning about in maths. He used some scientific words like, predict, observe, and explain. Some of his designs I liked was his hoverboard and the air canon.

Jarrah Hatherly – 2LM