This page contains lots of resources and guides to help teachers or outreach teams to safely and successfully do the experiments on this page

Safety

The video by OHSVideoProduction below is a student-friendly lab safety video you may wish to show in class and applies well to older age ranges

This video by Miss Dahlman’s World on youtube may be more suitable for younger audiences

Moreover, it may be beneficial to have a written safety guide for students, especially if you are using new techniques or reagents the students have not seen before.

For older children, exam boards often require risk assessments, which are beneficial as they require the students to consider the risks thoroughly. The University of Birmingham has a guide to risk assessment that teachers may wish to read to help identify the structure of a risk assessment. Cleapss is a health and safety service that provides information on different chemicals and equipment, it may be worth seeing if the school has access.

Equipment

Whilst a lot of the equipment needed is standard and easy to use, some of it may be new to the students or volunteers. The glossary page has plenty of definitions and explanations of less common types of glassware. There is also myriad videos on youtube that show how to use some other pieces of equipment.

Experimental Planning

Depending on the age range of the students, the complexity of the experimental planning may differ however, it is always beneficial to encourage students to think of ‘fair testing’. From year 5/6, students become aware of variables. The types of variables are…

Independent variable: what the student will change e.g. concentration of salt

Dependent variable: what the students will measure e.g. height the plant grew

Control variable: what the students will keep the same through every experiment, to ensure only the effect of the independent variable is measure e.g. temperature of the room

You may wish to discuss with the class the variables in their experiment, encouraging them to come up with ideas before guiding them towards the answer.

Variables are a large part of experimentation across science, so it is always good to begin to consider this concept at a young age.

Younger children will not have come across variables, but you may wish to discuss (if applicable) how they can keep their experiment ‘fair’ i.e. make sure only one variable is being measured.