Primary Science Skills and How to Teach Them

Strategies and activities to support upper primary children (aged 7-11) to develop a range of scientific skills, which can subsequently be applied in their own scientific investigations.

Scientific enquiry is essentially a thinking process. For children to undertake effective science enquiries in the classroom, they need to know how to collect and interpret useful data. Simply meeting science skills during practical activities is rarely enough for them to be learned and embedded.

Primary Science Skills and How to Teach Them, written by PSTT Fellow Tracy Tyrrell, supports the development of ‘working scientifically’ skills. Building on the more open-ended, exploratory approach of lower primary, these materials cover the skills required at each stage of a scientific enquiry and are mapped to different scientific enquiry types, providing teachers with a comprehensive choice of activities.

The resources are based on two earlier books written by Anne Goldsworthy, Rod Watson and Valerie Wood-Robinson which were originally created for children aged 9-13. Getting to Grips with Graphs (1999) and Developing Understanding (2000) were the outcomes of the AKSIS project: a three-year research collaboration between the Association for Science Education and King’s College London, funded by the Wellcome Trust.