Discovery

Science Writing for Children

Fiona Rendle

Children can cope with technical jargon in science articles, if it is in a context that gives clues to the meaning, says a primary school teacher working with scientists. Her work might also be more widely applicable to science writing aimed at anyone who can't tell an electron from a gene.

Margaret Ward has tested the level of language used by scientists and the response of children, while on a one-term New Zealand Science and Technology Teacher Fellowship with Canterbury University's Physics and Astronomy Department.

Ward, a teacher for 30 years, has been using the "Ask a Scientist" programme as the basis for her research. This programme has been running for several years and gives children the opportunity to get an expert answer by mail to scientific questions like "how do clouds float?". The children receive a personal letter from a scientist and the replies are later published in newspapers throughout New Zealand.

She says that children are very honest about the language used. One child asked "How come you -- a person of your age and brain capacity -- used words like that?"

Ward has visited various schools in Canterbury, doing activities based on the replies to the letters and analysing the language in the letters. She has found it's not always clear what language will provide a problem -- one activity based on the number of stars in the sky, which used an analogy of grains of sand in a cathedral, did not work in some country schools because the children did not know what a cathedral was.

Sentence structure is also important, because children read linearly and will not go back to re-read complex sentences. Children responded best when the writing was in a conversational, active voice style. One reply, written in poetry and prose, was a huge success, with the children understanding the concepts in the poem better than those expressed in prose.

In conjunction with Dr John Campbell of the Physics and Astronomy Department, Ward is writing articles for science journals on how to write science for children. At present, feedback to scientists is informal -- she notes that writing in simple language took effort on the part of the scientists and she doesn't want to put them off writing for children by giving them a lot of rules.

Children are very interested in science, she says, recalling a silent reading time being abandoned because a child had just received a reply to a question, and was unable to read it without exclamations of "Wow" and "Phew" sparking other children's interest.

As well as studying language, Ward has been preparing a plan for a focus on science involving an entire primary school and developing a science and language resource book based on the "Ask a Scientist" programme. The resource book is designed for use with little extra work by the teacher. It can be used as part of a study for a class or as extension work for a gifted child. The activities are designed to be done by the children on their own, and cover the science curriculum.

Ward enjoyed her Fellowship and found being able to fossick around the university library good for personal development. She felt guilty at times for not having a group of children about, but says it was a good opportunity to go to other schools and see how they operated.

Fiona Rendle is a student in Canterbury University's Journalism Department.