Being Scientists at S.M.I.T.H
We have many enthusiastic scientists at St Michaels, and we want to take every opportunity to help our children understand how important science is for everyone and to make links to the science behind everyday objects and activities.
We use the Developing Experts scheme of work as the backbone of our science teaching. We also add other investigations and experiments so we can suit our teaching to our learners’ needs and next steps. We are very lucky to have our wild garden that enables us to investigate living things and their habitats and take part in events like the RSPB Great British Birdwatch without leaving the school site!
Our Science Policy Document can be found here:
Primary_National_Curriculum_-_Science
What is taught when? The St Michael’s 2025-2026 science overview
science-subject-overview 25-26
Raising our Science Capital
Another way we raise the profile of STEM subjects is by engaging with STEM Ambassadors. We are especially delighted as many of the visiting ambassadors are parents of children in our school. Evidence shows that engaging with STEM Ambassadors can help young people to achieve their full potential in STEM subjects as well as inspiring them to explore the STEM careers both in the North West and globally. It also helps teachers make links between the curriculum and the most up-to-date real world happenings, and means we have access to some wonderful resources. Other parents have made videos showing us what their job entails, to help all our children see that science is relevant to them and their world, and to consider the huge range of STEM careers they might pursue in their futures.
This year, we have been delighted to welcome teams from CSL Sequirus who showed us where a career in chemistry could take us, Liverpool University Biosciences department who shared their groundbreaking research on Biomes, Merseytravel, who showed us how engineering can become a ‘passport around the world’, and Liverpool University Palaeontology Department who talked to us about all things dinosaurs!
We also had a great time participating in the Great Science Share, exploring the question, ‘Do people with longer arms throw further?’
British Science Week 2026 – What’s Your Question? 
Legend has it that Archimedes (a scientist and mathematician) noticed that when he climbed into a soaking bath the water level would go up. Archimedes realized that solids denser than water would be lighter when immersed in a fluid due to the weight of the water displaced.
This is why you feel lighter in water than walking on the ground!
King Hieron II of Syracuse had a problem. He worried that his crown makers were charging him the price of a solid gold crown, but making his crown out of a mixture of silver and gold (which costs less than solid gold). Luckily, the King and Archimedes were friends. Archimedes used his knowledge of water displacement to determine if the King’s
crown was actually made of solid gold.
We used this story to springboard our British Science Week STEM investigation, exploring buoyancy, volume and density. Using aluminium foil, we designed and made boats, and tested how many pennies we could balance on each one. Winners from each class were awarded a prize and certificate!
Local Partnerships – Sefton Palm House
We were delighted to collaborate with our friends and neighbours at Sefton Palm House when they relaunched their education programme to schools in the local area, and have enjoyed some brilliant science enrichment trips there this year!
Award winner Rose!
We are so proud of our Rose, who won a competition run by University of Liverpool Department of Biomedicine to design her own biome! The prize was a whopping £500 to invest in science books to be enjoyed by all the children in our school! We used some of this money to spend celebrating Women in Science Week, with Rose dishing out the prizes across school, and the rest to buy whole class sets of high quality science books for our budding scientists to use in their science and reading lessons!
