School trips

On Friday, I was lucky (hmmm...) enough to be asked to go on a school trip with the year 7 & 8 science clubs that I help out with. The trip was to a science fair hosted as part of the STEM clubs group (STEM is science, technology, engineering and math, as I discovered!). The fair was an opportunity to show what we had been doing over the past year and meet (and steal ideas from) other schools also involved. Also there were the MoD, the institute of physics, an aeronautics group (involved in the flying start challenge our year 9's took part in) and the Bloodhound team with the scale model of the car they hope will break the land speed record!

It was great fun and good to "network" but it was also slightly strange. It's the first time I'd been on a school trip in over 5 years and the first time I was there as a "responsible adult" (gulp!). It was a chance to get to know two of my collegues better as there was a fair bit of waiting around, and a rock physics lecture (about the physics of rock music, not stones), taken by a Dr Lewney, where Becky and I were in our element! It was also impressive (I think that's the best word) that one of our kids managed to get the number of a girl from one of the other schools!!

I'd been having a rather bad week at work, so being able to do science, get ideas and relax a bit more than normal and get paid for it was a real relief. Next time though, can we leave the kids behind?? Actually, next year I think that it's our turn to plan and host it...we have quite a challenge ahead of us!

We also had a bit of excitment today. One of the year 7 science club projects has been hatching chicken eggs. For the past three ish weeks we'd had these eggs incubating in our prep room, and had pretty much given up all hope of them hatching. The school doesn't have the best track record. So imagine my surprise and excitement when one of the teachers simply said this morning "aparrently it'll be ok to move the two chicks into the incubator in a bit." wow!! Over the weekend four of the chicks had hatched!! And they are totally adorable, but really distracting as they sit and cheep on the side! One of them has a bit of a dodgy leg so has been removed of extra special treatment but the others are all healthy. Now we need to name them...! Any ideas?



That's it for now,

Clare xx