British Sign Language Glossaries of Curriculum Terms

BSL Environmental Science Glossary - Model definition

Definition: Models are a way of describing/explaining an idea/concept/system or a process in order to help us try and understand it. For example, in science, a teacher might ask pupils about the size of the planets. To help them get a sense of this they could start with the size of the Earth and compare it with Mars. The teacher might then show the pupils a picture (model) of all the planets to scale from the largest to the smallest. Another example would be the atom - scientists have been studying the atom for many years and thinking about how best to describe it - to do this they have created different models.