With the summer holidays drawing to an end I’ve sat down and completed the first unit of BTEC Introductory Science that I will be team teaching with the Brunts School in Mansfield.  When we planned to do a course together we wanted to do something special, to get the best out of a group of pupils with special needs, and to work with the intention of developing the skills set of all members of staff involved. 

I’m hoping that the pupils enjoy the course – no writing apart from assignments (and then only very little), some video work, and lots and lots of experiments.  Hopefully pupils will be enthused and their love of science rekindled before we start the more content heavy topics.

It’s easy to lose track of the awe and wonder of science, with APP, learning objectives, starters, targets and other things that we end up having to build into our lessons.  We intend to put back some of the fun into science and hope that leads to some good results.

I’ve uploaded all the planning and resources to the Wiki I share with the Brunts School.  If you would like our resources, check out my resources site here (where there are lots more free science SEN resources).

Get in touch if you’d like to know more about BTEC Introductory or if you have any success stories you would like to share.

I’ve been pretty amazed at the number of people (presumably teachers and teaching assistants) who have found my resources online.  I’m getting 20 to 40 hits a day which I was quite pleased with.  In the three weeks since I uploaded the BTEC Science resources, 230 people have followed the link from the TES site and the BTEC resources have had 800 page views (according to Google Analytics).

I attribute the popularity of these resources to the price (FREE!) and the fact that there are very few BTEC Science resources on the market despite the spiralling popularity of the course.  My head told me I ought to sell my resources commercially through a publisher, but that means polishing them further, and filling them out to cover more topics.  Having seen the dubious quality of many published SEN resources from authors who seem to have done just that I didn’t want to go down that route.  All of my resources were created to use with specific classes and not for cash.

After completing my NPQH I returned to the classroom as an AST because of my passion for science teaching and ensuring students have the best possible science education.  If giving my resources away means more teachers using them in their classrooms and enhancing the science education of their students then that is reward enough.  Ultimately I want to see teachers taking my ideas and techniques and using them with their own pupils to improve science provision for all.

That is why I give my science resources away!

(And that’s why I like to hear from people who use them!  If you use my resources in your science lessons, leave a comment below and let me know what you think of them!)

I’ve also uploaded the course materials including the “Teaching Assistant’s toolkit” which are some of the resources from a course I ran a couple of years ago.

I’ve taken the opportunity to clarify the copyright of the materials by adding a copyright page.  The materials are released under a creative commons license, click on the button below for more information.

Whilst we are not a very busy site we do receive a steady stream of visitors following our links from Google or the TES site. I would like to continue to offer my resources for others. The alternatives were paying for a hosted solution (which still requires man-hours to maintain and update) or to use a free site such as a Wiki.

I decided to do the latter and have moved all of our sites onto free providers (such as Google’s blogger etc.) My (free) science worksheets and resources will continue to be available at http://resources.fiendishlyclever.com until I find a better home for them. I’ve uploaded all the files that were on the previous site – SEN worksheets to support QCA, AQA GCSE Core science and WJEC Entry level.

Thank you to the very few people who have taken these files and bothered to register/leave feedback – it is for you that I have left these resources on the Internet.

Edit: Sept 08 As you will see from my blog I had to move the worksheets to a new home.  Take a look at the sheets on their temporary home.