Me, You & Science Too

Supporting families with early years reading and STEM activities: what works?

About MYST

Me, You and Science Too (MYST) was a STEM and literacy engagement project, supporting families of children in Early Years at Battle Hill Primary School. It was also a research project, adopting an action research methodology to explore the most effective ways of securing family involvement with literacy and STEM.

Over two years, MYST brought families together, sharing a variety of young children’s fiction in ten tailored story-reading and STEM activity sessions. Providing regular interactions, carefully curated literature, and engaging, replicable STEM activities we hoped would improve outcomes in reading and science for the children in Nursery and Reception at the school, and the frequency of shared reading at home.

MYST also applied ideas from the field of behavioural insights to explore effective practice for improving parental engagement with schools. By collecting data on the effectiveness of our communication and engagement approaches as they were trialled, we were able to refine our models and methods over the course of the two year project.

Below you’ll find the MYST Library, which contains links to the books and their accompanying STEM activities. You will also find an evaluation summary, a review of targets, audience engagement the impacts of the MYST project.

MYST Library

Click on the books below to find a description of them, how we used them in the MYST sessions and links to the accompanying STEM activities.

Hey, Water!

Somebody Swallowed Stanley

Little Cloud

Robots, Robots Everywhere!

Moon-Night Time Around the World

The Black Rabbit

Look Up!

Violet the Pilot

Summary of Evaluation

We evaluated the MYST project to see how successful it was in meeting its intended aims. The headline findings are:

Overall, the MYST project can be considered a success. It has made good progress against target deliverables and measures of success.
The MYST project developed an initial Theory of Change, which was actively refined during the course of the project and adapted to include delivery in remote contexts.
The MYST project used the East model as best practice guidance for supporting engagement. The Covid pandemic provided the opportunity to test this in two circumstances: face-to-face delivery and remote delivery. It was found to be valuable in both circumstances.
The project found evidence to support increased access to STEM literacy at home, increased enjoyment with regards family reading of early years texts, improved home-school relations in education, and increased skill and knowledge of techniques to engage harder to reach families.
Evidence did not show an increase in frequency of shared reading among families but did support a diversification of reading materials used within family homes.
While parents have added the MYST books into their books at home and use them regularly, we found the STEM activities were not repeated as often.
We feel that the science could have been drawn out of the stories more overtly from the outset and used more heavily within the marketing of the project without negatively impacting engagement.

The final evaluation report reviewed whether the MYST project met its delivery and audience engagement targets, the value of the behavioural insights model for improving engagements, and whether the project had met its intended aims:

A summary of the final evaluation report can be found here.

The full final evaluation report of the MYST project can be found here.

Project partners

NUSTEM was delighted to partner with Battle Hill Primary School to delivery MYST.

Funding

MYST was funded by the Shine Trust, under their Ready for School funding initiative.

“Somebody Swallowed Stanley, she loved that one. She told everyone about it and then we went to the beach and things and suddenly she’s ‘you’ve got to take your rubbish home because it ends up in the sea’. She really notices what the book says”.

Parent

“It has allowed our children to not only learn, but learn while spending quality time with their parents in a fun and interactive way in school. This has definitely broken-down barriers for some families.”

Head Teacher

“The children have enthusiastically talked about the sessions and it has been lovely to see the parents uploading photos on Seesaw, showing us they are following up the activities at home and re reading the books.”

EYFS Lead