For several years, Sevenoaks School has been hosting summer schools for gifted and talented pupils from local primary schools. This year 30 children took part in a maths course, which ran for two days, and 38 children in a four day science course.
This has been the second year running the Maths Gifted and Talented programme. We had 30 children who came because they had a keen interest in the subject. Throughout the two days they had interactive lessons on topics that many of the children had not seen before which they thoroughly enjoyed. We also got the children working on the computers trying to decode messages which were then used in a Maths Detective trail on the final day. They worked in teams of two or three, solving puzzles and problems to find out the clues. There was great excitement throughout the groups as they tried to complete it in time. Overall it was a very successful programme and the children left with a fun and positive outlook on the subject.
In the science course, children took part in activities such as chicken wing dissection to learn bone names and how muscles contract, snail racing to investigate animal movement without bones, making wormeries to investigate hydrostatic skeletons, learning about how fast things move in space, taking part in a parachute drop/egg drop challenge investigating air resistance, launching rockets to learn about streamlining, creating laser mazes to investigate the speed of light, reflection and refraction and comparing the speed of sound and light using thunder and lightning.
The children thoroughly enjoyed the courses in both subjects:
Joshua Clark, Otford primary school – ‘The maths course was really fun – I enjoyed all the games, and learning new things like Pythagoras’
Monty Thompson, Chevening primary school – ‘From dissecting a chicken wing to learning about planets in our solar system – I can’t wait to learn more complex science at big school!’
Fergus Hampton, Otford primary School – ‘’It was really fun. I loved learning about exponential numbers!’Rebecca Withey, Otford primary school – ‘It was a fantastic experience and a great chance to make new friends. The experiments we did were fun and educational. My two favourite parts were dissecting a chicken wing and making a wormery’.
