As part of our Science curriculum in S3 we have been undertaking a series of lessons on Health and Technology. We have been investigating how the body works – especially the heart and lungs. We have been finding out how to give somebody a simple health MOT – and practised this on staff. We have increased our understanding of the effect of poor diet, pollution and unhealthy practises on our well being – and overlapped this nicely with our ELP Health lessons elsewhere in the curriculum.
One aspect of Health and Technology we have covered of late is smoking and its impact on your health…
Click on the above link and you will find a summary sheet that covers most aspects of the work undertaken in the classroom on smoking. As part of these lessons the pupils were challenged with as much independent research as they could manage, including doing some work at home finding out who smokes, what makes smoking so addictive and the things that can be affected adversely by smoking.
We were very impressed with the amount of prior knowledge and detail in the independent research with parents. In addition to this we considered the impact of smoking on particular groups in society…
- what would be the effect on pregnant women and their babies?
- would someone like Ussain Bolt smoke and what difference would it make to his performance?
- why do young people smoke and is it really cool?
We had differentiated learning targets that varied from being able to state that smoking can make you unwell through to being able to state that carbon monoxide prevents blood carrying enough oxygen round the body – or to babies inside their pregnant mums.
We also linked all of this work back into the lungs lessons – in particular to the work we have already done looking at the effect of exercise on our health and breathing rate.