During our Year 6 Transition Days, new students to Northgate had the opportunity to experience a wide variety of lessons across so many subject areas, taught by Northgate and Dereham Sixth Form teachers. On top of this, they also had the chance to become crime scene investigators with a special visit from the team at Forensic Minds. Seren and Kyra, two Year 7s, were lucky enough to join in these activities and tell us all about the day:
‘For the last day of the Year 6 transition, they took part in many fun events and some year 7s also got a chance to participate in CSI activities for the day.
We took our fingerprints and learned how to identify what type of fingerprints we had using magnification. These were either a whorl, a loop or an arch which are found by looking at their bifurcations and ridges. We chose our best fingerprint and put it in a key ring to take home. We then compared the fingerprints of our three suspects to those from the hypothetical crime to see which matched up.
We used a dental antigen solution to make a mould of our thumbs and filled it with plaster of Paris to make a cast. This part was really enjoyable.
We also learned some of the multiple ways the CSI and other investigators study how crimes are committed. To help explain which methods are used, and discover how, two people smashed grapefruits. One was smashed slowly and gently and the other was smashed quickly and hard. We saw how the speed of impact affects the markings left on the ground.
One of the last activities of the day was investigating the velocity of blood spatter and discovering how height affects it. We used fake blood and dropped it on different materials from four heights. The fake blood was mainly made of tomato puree. This part wasn’t our particular favourite as it was a bit gruesome!
We hope these transition days have been fun and helped Year six prepare for September. It was great to meet them and see them so involved in the activities. We absolutely loved being part of Forensic Minds’ CSI themed day.’
A huge thank you to the team at Forensic Minds for such a jam-packed day. We are sure it will have inspired many of our students and given them a real insight into how crime scenes are looked at and crimes solved through the use of different techniques.
   
