Teach Primary Issue 18.4

34 | www.teachwire.net A re you going to write a science fiction novel?” This was the question I was frequently asked while studying for a master’s in creative writing a few years ago. It must have seemed an obvious question to ask the only person in the class with a science degree, but my fellow students usually seemed surprised to find that my literary tastes were often very similar to their own. Neither did my classmates expect that I would have a greater passion for literature than I do for science – if I had to choose between reading novels and reading science books, I’d pick novels every time. I’ve loved reading since my father first taught me how to do it. We were Bangladeshi immigrants, and the only books we had brought over with us were a Quran and another Islamic text. But one day, my father turned up with a children’s alphabet book, sat me on his knee, and eventually led me to that wondrous moment that lots of primary teachers must share with their pupils: realising that the squiggles on a page can be decoded into words. Without giving you the whole sob story of my childhood, I’m not exaggerating when I write that reading was central to my happiness back then. Choosing a path Science was not something I took much interest in until my GCSEs, when I was lucky to have great teachers who made me see that their subject could open up exciting new ways of looking at and making sense of the world. I had always enjoyed my English lessons, regardless of who was teaching them, because I loved books and reading so much that it didn’t really matter what the teachers did. As well as having teachers who engaged me, there was another crucial difference between my science and English lessons: my English teachers never made me feel that writing books was something someone like me could ever do. My science teachers, however, made it clear that any one of us could grow up to be a scientist. As a science teacher myself now, I joke with my English-teaching colleagues that their jobs are much easier than mine – they don’t have to work so hard to engage students with their subject. I mean, it must surely be easier to captivate children with stories written by the best writers who ever lived than it is to make them engrossed in the behaviour of electric circuits or the properties of a gas? Whilst this may not be entirely true, there is plenty of research that supports the power of storytelling as a teaching tool, and it’s something that I’ve come to rely on in my work as both a teacher and an author who specialises in writing books about science. Making links In their paper Rethinking Narrative: Leveraging storytelling for science learning , Engel, Lucido and Cook write ‘A compelling narrative capitalises on the way children's brains naturally develop to process ideas, and it provides rich context to make otherwise seemingly abstract ideas relevant in a personally meaningful way.’ The authors apply this to developing ‘learning experiences’ at the Field Museum in Chicago and it’s something I have tried to do in my first picture book, How to Find a Rainbow . The book tells the story of two very different red panda sisters, who go in search of a rainbow, fall out with each other along the way, and ultimately work out for themselves how rainbows are formed. How to Find a Rainbow follows what is known as a ‘classical’ story structure, with an instigating incident that sets the main characters off on a journey of discovery. But it also has a science element to it that, I hope, might be useful for colleagues wanting to teach about light, or just science in general. According to the national curriculum, science teaching at KS1 should ‘enable pupils to experience and observe phenomena, looking more closely at the natural and humanly-constructed world around them’. And that’s really one of the messages at the heart of How to Find a Rainbow , and indeed, the other books I’ve written for “The methods of science – observation, experimentation and thinking skills – can all be drawn out of stories you perhaps already use” Alom Shaha explains how we can use fiction to engage children with science Science through STORIES