Happy Friday to ya! I just had the best time reading the comments for “Squeezing In Science.” Have you read them? I can’t wait to get home to microwave a flower. Actually, there’s a microwave in our kitchen; so if I can find a flower around here, I won’t even have to wait until I get home!
Be sure to check out the post and comments. In addition to some great ideas for squeezing in science, you’ll find the details to our latest book giveaway. In fact, let’s add this post to the giveaway too; leave a comment here, and we’ll enter your name for an additional chance to win! (See, this is what happens when you fire up my curiosity!)
Let’s chat about favorite science topics and themes, great children’s books for integrating science, and simple science experiments that amaze your students. How fun is that?
Bring on the comments! And if you’re traveling this holiday weekend, please buckle up and be safe!
Diane
Congrats to our contest winners: Deanna, Tina, and Debbie!
While I student taught, I planned a unit on the ocean. For our day about sharks, I used a great children’s book – “Surprising Sharks” by Nicola Davies. It included a lot of cool facts and fun illustrations. My students were really excited about the book, and I was, too. 🙂
I love doing science with my pre-k students – we do several topics throughout the year. Some are longer term experiments that we do over time (e.g. growing lima beans in baggies on the window, making compost and checking its development over time) and others are child-driven exploration located at our centers (e.g. playing with snow in the sensory table, experimenting with magnets). It’s always great to hear the kids’ observations!
I have two favorite science experiments. The first one is making flubber. You can get the recipe off the Internet. It is a great experiment when talking about states of matter.
My other favorite is making the water cycle in a baggie. I got this information from our local water district. We had a really fun time making these in class.
I love books, these are the ones I like to use for science:
A Child’s Introduction to the Night Sky
Atlas of the Earth
How Ben Franklin Stole the Lightning
Magic School Bus
Mysteries and Marvels of Science
Poles Apart
Seeds
The Kid’s Book of the Night Sky
What Is the Matter in Mr. Whisker’s Room?
Young Thomas Edison
My prek kids love to do chase the pepper. Shake pepper on to a clear glass of water and have them use a eyedropper to add a drop or 2 of dawn dish soap. They love to watch the pepper run to the sides of the cup.
I also let them experiment with vinegar and baking soda. Messy but they love it.
I could go on and on because the kids just love to do hands on science.
I love doing science experiments with my kindergarteners. One of my favorite science activities is color mixing. I give each student two colors of paint and we all mix at the same time to see what color it makes. After we are done I read the book “Mouse Paint” by Ellen Stoll Walsh.
In the spring I bring in caterpillars so we can watch the life cycle of a butterfly. Every morning my students race into the classroom to see the changes that take place overnight.
My K4 and schoolage kids this summer have truely enjoyed planning, digging and planting and now eating fruits and veggies in our garden. We have 8 different foods ranging from carrots to watermelon to greenbeans. So many areas this one summer long project has created, plus we are eating healthy foods, even those who a few months ago wouldn’t touch anything unless it was pizza or hamburger or just deep fried.
My 1st grade kids absolutely loved planting and watching flowers grow. They compared differnt flower seeds and kept a plant journal with measurements, descriptions and pictures.
As others have mentioned on here, planting/growing seeds is a favorite science experiment for early elementary students, and so is mixing colors.
I give the students small balls of play dough to mix together. Before they mix the colors, though, I have them guess what colors they think they will get. I read ‘White Rabbit’s Color Book’ by Alan Baker after the activity.
I always start off my unit on the oceans with the book Swimmy. The illustrations give us much to discuss as well as laying the groundwork for some of the terms we will talk about later.
I agree with the others that seeds and plants are my favorite science topic. I really like using “The Tiny Seed” by Eric Carle when my students are learning about seeds.
One of my favorite units is space. One of the expl rations that we really enjoy are film canister rockets. The kids really love shooting them off.
we also like to do an exploration of geodes. I talk about how things that may not be beautiful on the outside can be on the inside. Then i break open geodes to show the crystal centers. The children each get apiece to take home and share with thier families.
I would love to shoot off film canister rockets- how? My little ones love hands on science and I take every opportunity to allow them to explore. We don’t have classes during the summer and a garden would not work for our classes but we do an apple tree experiment that starts in November with eating apples and sprouting the seeds. Our unit ends the week before Mother’s Day when we decorate the apple tree pots and present an apple tree to each Mom.
Science is one of my favorite subjects to teach, I teach prek and science is very hands on which is perfect for them. This past year while leaving the library we ran into the 6th graders conducting their science experiments on not breaking the egg. You know the experiment where the student has to create a container that houses an egg- the housing has to keep the egg from breaking when dropped from the 2nd floor landing. My kids loved it and wanted to do it themselves they were creative- I gave them plastic easter eggs instead. However the lesson that we teach every year is growing corn. In November I begin the unit by reading different stories about the first Thanksgiving, and our class favorite Albert’s Thanksgiving by Leslie Tryon. I bring in as many of the differnt types of food that I can or I bring pictures. We cut open a pumpkin and clean it out and I place Native American corn cobs and gourds into the sensory table for investigating. On Friday, the week before Thanksgiving, I ask what would happen if we place the corn into water and put it in the window. It grows, after a good root system starts and it sprouts we palnt the corn and by spring we have little ears of corn. It is great and the kids see the process.
I did the film canister rockets as a science project with my first graders this year. The first time we did it, we added too much water and it didn’t work. We tried again and it was a great success. It was a great lesson for my students on not giving up. We talked about how scientists have to keep experimenting.
I teach 4th grade and science is my favorite subject to teach. This year we will be “sorta” departmentalizing and I will have 2 different groups of 4th graders to teach science to. My favorite topics are Rocks (Earth Science) and Space. This year we will also be planting a butterfly garden outside my back door so I extra excited about all the science I can teach there.
I’m a homeschool mom of a 6 year old. Last year when I taught my daughter for kindergarten, she loved to learn about clouds and weather. We made a “camera” out of cardboard and we went outside everyday for a week and she took pictures of the different types of clouds and anything else weather wise.
My beginning of the year Science Lab for 5th graders to teach observation skills is called “The Cat’s Meow”. With just some whole milk, Dawn dish detergent, food coloring, toothpicks or cotton balls, and petri dishes, the students get to observe an amazing sight! When a drop of detergent is placed in the middle of the dish of milk, the detergent pushes the fat molecules and causes the milk to start to swirl. The food coloring is placed in drops so the students can see the reaction. At the end of the year, we repeat the experiment with our kindergarten science buddies.
During the first snow, no matter what the lesson plans say, we have a teachable moment to show melting and freezing. I gather a bucket full of snow and show the kids. Before they leave, we look to see what happened. The next day, we review what happened, talk about how the bucket was full of snow, but now is only partially filled with water. Then we talk about what would happen if we put the water in the freezer and make predictions. We stick the bucket in the freezer then review the predictions the next day and compare to the actual experiment.
I am a special education teacher in a middle school. I have the students in the DCD classroom. My students LOVE hands on projects. Science is a great way to have my kids do hands on experiments.
I have so many favorite Science topics that it’s hard to choose just one favorite. This year we are planting Milkweed and we are going to have a Monarch Butterfly Habitat at the school and it’s going to be great. There are so many things we can do with it. We are also growing CornEar Worms in our classroom and studying the life cycle of them and getting to watch it. The children are going to get to make posters and a documentary over what they see and find out about them. Cotton is great also and we are planting Cotton seeds to grow for our study of plants and seeds. With Cotton it’s great because the kids love to see it go from the seed we planted to the plant and then we get to examine it and take it apart to find the new seeds inside the cotton that we can plant next year or that they can take home. We also read “The Tiny Seed” and the kids love it.
With the preschool children, there is so much to do with them in science. The best topic seems to be ” Animals all around us” they enjoy doing all the different activities on animals. The children also seem to really enjoy ‘Exploring the world around us” activities. This topic lets us go outside a lot to explore around us and use all our senses to discover what our world has to offer.There is so much hands on activities for this age. It is so exciting to watch the little ones beginning to discover the world.
It is so much fun to do science with younger students, they get so excited about learning. One of my favorite science topics to do is the “What Floats” lesson. First of all I have a list of items from which I have the students choose individually which items will float and which ones will sink. I have individual charts for each students to record their predictions. Once everyone has made their predicitions, then I will have the students help me place the items in the water to test their predictions. After everything has been tested, we record the results from the experiment on their record sheet. Then I will talk with the students about why particular items floated or why they sank. Then I have the students compare what really happened to the predictions. This is alot of fun to do with the students and they like it because it is interactive.
I love doing the properties of water with my Pre-Kers. We make ice from water (solid and liquid) then when the ice melts I put it in a hot pot to heat up and become vapor (gas). This I do when it starts getting cold out, then when the Spring comes I am ready to teach the Water Cycle in time for Earth Day. I am always amazed at how much they retain over the months. I pull out the hot pot again and we make our own rain as part of the water cycle.
During February (dental month) I have always done the “Sweet Tooth Test” with my prek students. Three “cleaned” eggshells (teeth) are placed in containers labeled “water,” “vinegar,” (acid) and “cola” (sugar). Students observe changes in the eggshells over the week encouraging not only healthy brushing habits, but also choices in food/drink. Clear plastic containers with kid-proof lids make this test observable and hands on.
I moved to kindergarten after teaching 4th grade, I think my little ones enjoy science alot. We always seem to get dirty. Cutting up pumpkins, building terrariums, getting out the sand/water table for sink or float experiments. Of course I read a lot of books to the students to go along with all this activity and the books are put in the class library for them to read over and over.
I teach to young students, 1st and 2nd graders. We were doing a unit on our 5 senses in October, near Halloween. What I did was have tupperware containers of different food items that represented different parts of a witch. There was balled melon for her eyeballs, string pasta for her hair, almond slivers for her toenails, carrots for her nose and salami for her tongue. I blindfolded the kids and placed a paper plate in front of them. Then I handed them one item at a time to smell, touch and taste and then guess what the food item was. When we were done, then they could see what it was. It was so much fun and some of the food items they had never tried before and actually like them. They were so excited and I had more food that they invited some of the kids from the other class to come in and they performed the demonstration for the other kids. Of course, we all used our best scary halloween voices when we gave out each item.
Science for a PK-1 kinesthetic learner means lots of hands-on lessons and a theme that can be varied, so I chose Old MacDonald: He starts off with a farm, expands his enterprise to a zoo, and even diversifies into transportation (simple machines as well as things that go). Of course, it’s natural to transition from airplanes to the space shuttle, so Old MacDonald might just find himself starting his own space agency as the student learns about the moon, the stars, planets, and other components of outerspace. Discussion of comets and meteors usually leads into a unit on dinosaurs, which I use as a jumping off point for lessons on volcanoes, earthquakes, tsunamis, tornadoes, and hurricanes. We can then go more in-depth into weather (wind, clouds, sun, rain, snow) and seasons. Right now, we’re working on day/night, which will naturally progress to lessons on sleep, nutrition, and health/hygiene in preparation for back-to-school.
We’d do a daily weather report at circle time. We made a weather predictor out of a paper plate and divided the plate into “pie” sections and drew a simple line drawing of various types of weather. Then the children, after deciding what kind of weather we were currently having, they predict the next days weather. Then I would go around the circle, they show me what they choose, and I would graph on a white board with tally marks. Then it became a math lesson as we first estimated then counted what kind of weather was the winner! We also kept track of the entire month’s weather winner so we could graph that too. The kids loved it!
My favorite resource is Picture Perfect Science. It has lessons in the 5E format and it has picture books. My 5th graders still love hearing a picture book. I just created stations for Chemical Cafe from the book.
I teach elementary Life Skills. My kids LOVE science! I am always on the lookout for new ideas to keep them interested and learning. Some of the things we did this year included growing sunflowers, butterflies, making colored ice paintings to watch the ice melt and blend colors. We also made koolaid paintings during our 5 senses unit. The Mailbox always has such FABULOUS ideas! I can’t wait to see what comes out next 🙂
Nature Science is my favorite time of the day. I love using the author Eric Carle’s books for the classroom. The scholastic website has many teaching suggestions for using Eric Carle’s books. I have used these ideas and expanded them for school agers. They love learning science in a fun, relaxed atmosphere without being graded. The website is www2.scholastic.com.
I teach Kdg.in a PK3-8th grade school. Quite a few of my students have siblings in middle school believe it or not. Doing science projects in middle school is a big deal at our school. I have always thought it would be beneficial for the lower grade teachers to go through the process with their classes all the way to making the board and displaying it so that when they have to do it in middle school they are already familiar with it. I am going to make that my goal this year! Dare I suggest it to the other teachers???
When I taught kindergarten, I taught thematically. A lot of my units focused on science topics, such as plants, insects, dinosaurs, seasons, and human body. During these units, it was easy to come up with activities for the science center, but I also tried to incorporate science into my reading/listening center with non-fiction books on the subject. Books like “The Pumpkin Circle” really engaged my students’ interests. They would refer back to the books at other times during the week, saying, “We read about that in that book in the reading center!” I loved watching their minds work as they made connections to literature through science!