It has been an absolute joy to create this resource, from working closely with teaching practitioners, to collecting footage of our beautiful exhibits this downloadable workshop represents a successful collaboration of experts in their field.
Now teachers across the UK can benefit from a premium classroom resource that has been tailored to the needs of practitioners.
Through teacher curriculum review conferences and feedback from our previous learning resources we identified several areas for which practitioners particularly desired resources to support their delivery.
Evolution was one of the topic areas that often flagged as a difficult unit to generate energy and enthusiasm. Many teachers understood the concepts and importance of the unit but struggled to engage classes with the key concepts.
This is one of the main reasons that we selected evolution as our first workshop in this series. Another factor that we made this important choice was that the spiralling curriculum focus repeats back to evolution through every key stage, starting with fossils and bones at key stage one, the rock cycle and processes at key stages two and three, and onward to selection genetics in key stage four, and chromosomes and gene pools in key stage five.
As a vital feature embedded throughout the science curriculum evolution was a prudent choice for a valuable and widely applicable resource to begin our downloadable workshop series.
Workshop Preview
The evolution workshop offers a fun and interactive introduction to model the key principles of evolution. The class play two curriculum linked games, which allow them to create their own creatures with randomly selected adaptations.
Students take their creature through several ecosystems and challenging scenarios of an ever-changing world. Natural selection principles are reinforced as only the strongest and best adapted creatures will survive. Students cover many curriculum linked key concepts through the lesson and engage with the educational content in an interactive way through entertaining presentation and exciting footage.
As outreach events and school trips are reduced following the global pandemic, these downloadable workshops make a connection with the ocean available to every classroom and every student.
These accessible downloadable workshops increase ocean literacy and the full series will hit curriculum criteria for science, mathematics, citizenship, and English, and at the same time fulfil many aspects of the national sustainable development goals that are vitally important to promote in education. We are so excited that our aquarium and conservation education programme is now available and accessible to all people globally, reaching so many more young people and educating the next Ocean literate generation.
This has been an exceptional opportunity to work together to generate such valuable and lifelong resources. Resources that could potentially connect students with the ocean from anywhere reachable by internet, this is indeed an exciting genesis for our educational contribution from the Ocean Conservation Trust!