Wrapping up

or just use a clock and tell them you’ve got until five past or something like that, to make sure that the kids know how much time they’ve got. And so that they all start finishing at the same time. And think about how you’re going to get them to finish. Do they have to tidy their things away? Do they have to put equipment back if you were doing something more practical? Are they gonna make sure that their area is clean? Give them time for that and plan that into what you’re doing to make sure that when you finish you can end on a high note with lots of interesting questions, a nice summarizing statement, talk about what you’ve been doing.

Leave them inspired, leave them happy, leave them wanting to learn more. When you’re wrapping up a lesson, it’s really important to address all of the points that you wanted them to take away. So learning outcomes, for example, or learning objectives. You need to wrap those points up and make it relative to what they’ve done in the lesson. So say the reason that you’ve done all this is because of this, and you can then go on to explain exactly what you meant by the lesson and what they were meant to take away from it.

When I’m wrapping up an activity with young people, when they’re very young you can see that they’re starting to lose interest or they’re starting to lose concentration. So in the last ten minutes or so I might put another picture up, or a picture they’re already seen, a slide they’ve already seen that I got a laugh out of or something like that. And I’ll just try and give them a short summary of what the purpose of the STEM activity was so that they can go home understanding why they did what they did. I like to ask them questions to see what they’ve learned.

I like to, with the young children, if they’ve done an activity, I like to have a few come up and show what they’ve done, because the thing about primary school kids is they’re very proud about whatever they’ve accomplished. For the older kids, for secondary school kids, in the last ten minutes a Q and A session’s really good. And sometimes you’ll get really interesting questions from them that leads onto more complex topics. [MUSIC]