Our Cambridge Grade 1–4 and Bilingual Grade 5–6 students recently spent a day at the Hefei Science Museum—and they didn’t arrive as tourists. They arrived prepared.

In the weeks before the visit, students had been exploring flowering plants, materials and

their properties, magnetism, light and shadow, particle models, forces, measurements, and 2D and 3D shapes in class. The museum gave them somewhere to take that knowledge and test it against the real world.

Moving through halls dedicated to nature, human biology, energy conservation, mathematics, smart manufacturing, and more, students recognized ideas they’d already encountered and encountered ideas they hadn’t yet — which is exactly the right combination.

Moving through the halls, students asked questions freely, followed their curiosity from one exhibit to the next, and made connections between what they’d studied and what they were seeing—often in peer discussions that needed no teacher to start them.