I’ve dragged a desk outside and the class are gathered around it, agog.I’m sweating – what if it doesn’t work? I pop the fizzy tablet into the capsule and slop in a little vinegar. I fumble a little but manage to snap the lid back on and slap it on to the desk. There’s a pause. Bubbles appear out of the side of the old film canister. I start to formulate a sentence where I explain why our rockets haven’t demonstrated Newton’s third law quite as clearly as I’d hoped…
Pop! The blessed little thing shoots into the air, gaining an altitude of three, maybe four, metres, with every eye in the class following in wonder. There are whoops of joy. Someone punches the air triumphantly (it may well have been me).
Now, vinegar and bicarb rockets are hardly new: I must have done them first 15 years ago and they haven’t let me down yet. But the sad fact is, it’s probably 10 years or more since I last blew the dust off my bag of film canisters and sent them into space. Somehow, there seems to be less time in the school day than ever before, and more things to fill that time with.
You have your “starter for five” arithmetic when you enter the classroom, your phonics session, a good hour for English and another for maths, guided reading is half an hour after lunch, there’s assembly and two PE lessons that must be fitted in. The primary curriculum is packed to bursting and it always seems to be the ace stuff, the stuff that really gets the children talking, that gets squeezed out.
So, when Tes contacted me to see whether I was up for a little experiment – one in which some of this stuff had the possibility of being reintroduced – they found a willing lab rat.
The experiment
This story is from the October 18, 2019 edition of TES.
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This story is from the October 18, 2019 edition of TES.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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