Recent activities organised and sponsored by the SGM

10-11 June 2002
St Martin's College, Lancaster
Royal Institution Primary School Workshops and INSET training
Dariel Burdass ran the ever popular practical sessions with Key Stage 2 children. These involved creative art activities to produce models of microbes out of pasta shapes and dough, painting handkerchiefs and testing out the power of yeast to blow up balloons. A great time was had by all. The pupils wore special T-shirts, with either a happy 'good' green microbe or a scowling 'bad' red microbe on the front.

Local primary school teachers and PGCE students took part in an INSET session on delivering Unit 6B - Microorganisms of the science schemes of work at KS2.

15-16 March 2002
Imperial College, London
BAYSDAY WORKSHOP (National Science Week)
The Amazing World of Microbes
Dariel Burdass led a workshop to show how microbes are all around us. Pupils, aged between 8 and 12 years old, discovered how we need some microbes to help us in our everyday lives while others cause disease in plants and animals. They explored the many environments inhabited by microbes, and then made models in petri dishes or 's'not nice pictures of their favourite microbes on hankies.
The leader of each school group attending the workshop took away a free set of the World of Microbes pack that has been developed to support the delivery of unit 6B Microbiology in the primary schemes of work.

3-5 January 2002
University of Liverpool
Association for Science Education Annual Meeting
SGM had a stand in the Living Science Exhibition area of the meeting where Dariel Burdass, Liz Sockett, Jane Westwell and Tracey Duncombe were pleased to talk to teachers and students about our resources and activities. The Society also sponsored a workshop on basic practical microbiology and held a party to launch our educational initiatives for the coming year. We were pleased to welcome friends old and new from the biology education arena and to talk to Council members and other representatives of the ASE about our activities to promote microbiology teaching in schools.

30 June 2001
Cirencester
Aspects of Modern Medical Science
SGM gave a grant to the Cirencester Science and Technology Society to run a public exhibition and lecture on this theme. SGM also provided a display on food safety and the gut flora, manned by Janet Hurst. The event was well attended and many post-16 students were to be seen looking at the wide range of exhibits, many of them focusing on microbiological themes.

7 June 2001
University of Glasgow
Post-16 Microbiology & Biochemistry Workshop for Teachers
The one day event, sponsored jointly by SGM and the Biochemical Society, was aimed at supporting Advanced Higher Biology teaching and updating teachers' own knowledge.

The programme included two talks, one on the Human Genome Project and the other on Antimicrobial Resistance delivered by an SGM member, Professor Tim Mitchell. The two practical sessions were on isolation and observation of Rhizobium, a nitrogen-fixing bacterium, and the structure and digestibility of carbohydrates.

Dr John Grainger, Chairman of MISAC, delivered the Rhizobium practical, demonstrating how to locate root nodules on leguminous plants before sterilizing and crushing some nodules to release the bacteria. These were inoculated on to an agar plate containing a source of fixed nitrogen in the medium which the teachers took back to school to incubate. Further samples were stained and examined under the microscope.
A factfile containing the protocol for this investigation now available.