Averil Macdonald
A great teachers resource

School for scientists

“Welcome to the lemon room.”

Outside the wind howled and the rain beat down and all round the town candles flickered in dark houses as people huddled together trying to keep warm.

In St Sophie’s the light was bright and cheery with not a candle in sight.

“Here is where we create what we call electricity. It flows in those wires over there and goes to every part of the school to light the lamps so that you can see to work. Much better than those old fashioned candles” Mistress Genevieve was showing the new students around their new school with great pride. She knew she could rely on them never to tell anyone what they had seen here. If they did, they might die! It was a simple as that. They would be accused of being witches and be burned at the stake. No one in the outside world knew anything about science but what they did know was that it was evil and bad and that scientists were evil and had to be stopped.

“My Mum told me all about this. It was here when she was a girl,” A quiet boy aged about 12 muttered, awestruck by what he had seen.

“My Dad too,” a tall girl with curly hair joined in.

“But remember,” Ms Genevieve continued, “it’s not magic, it’s not evil, and you must not say a WORD to anyone. EVER!”

With that she swept out of the room with the new students following obediently, each one wondering what they had let themselves in for.

“And here is where we spin the glass fibres.” The room was full of people taking large lumps of glass and spinning it finer and finer. “We need to get the fibres and thin a human hair. We think we can use them to send messages to each other just by flashing lights into the end. We still have some experiments to do, but it’s looking promising.”

“But that’s enough of the research side of things. I’ll show you more of that tomorrow. For the moment you just need to know where you are going for your first class tomorrow and then it’s time for bed. Here we are. The students’ laboratory.”

The students looked round open mouthed, each one thinking they would never be allowed into a real science laboratory.

(general school based story set in medieval times where real science is used to achieve things despite everyone’s fear of what they see as magic.)

” The room was full of people taking large lumps of glass and spinning it finer and finer. We need to get the fibres and thin a human hair.”

My Mum's a Scientist

A series of stories for primary age pupils to show mums can be scientists and scientists can be mums.

Choose a relative