Children learn about pollination in an edible way! Give students a paper bag with a white paper flower glued on it with Cheetos inside. Give each child a bee finger puppet to use while eating their Cheetos. Make sure students keep all of the Cheetos dust on their fingers without licking it off. Then have your kiddos "fly" to another child's bag and "pollinate" him/her with Cheetos dust.
Children learn about clouds and precipitation by creating their own cloud in jar! Add shaving cream "cloud" to a jar of water and then have children add food coloring droplets to the "cloud." Have your children observe the color droplets falling through from the clouds. Kids could collect data about their observations, such as the amount of droplets it took of each color for it to seep through the cloud or the amount of time it took. You can even create "table top clouds" by flipping their cups and observing the different colors in the clouds.
Children investigate magnetism with this Iron Swipe Card experiment. Sprinkle iron filings on the magnetic strip of an old swipe card and watch the filings fall into place! Tap it again for another picture!
Teach your kiddos about plant's needs by showing them that plants will grow toward light. Create a plant maze inside a shoe box, close it up and observe over the plant over the next few days. You will see your plant navigate through the maze to get to the light!
This is a gravity lesson wrapped up in a magic trick. Have your children impress family and friends by being able to tell whether or not an egg is raw or boiled. After chilling both eggs to the same temperature, spin both of the eggs on their side on a hard surface. One will spin and stand up straight, while the other will have difficulty even spinning. The hardboiled egg has an easier time spinning because it does not have liquid inside, like raw egg, to change the eggs center of gravity.
Oil spills have been a recent catastrophe to our oceans and students will learn about the difficulty of cleaning up these oil spills through this investigation. Pour vegetable oil into water and have children make predictions about which of the materials you have (gauze, spoon, cheese cloth etc.) will clean up the spill the best. Then, let them be the oil spill clean up crew by exploring which of these materials cleans up the oil spill most effectively.
Harness the power of the sun in a delicious way! Children can learn about solar energy with this delicious project. This link will show you a video about how to turn a pizza box into a solar oven with household materials. Reward your hardworking engineers with Mini-Pizzas or S'mores on your new, outdoor oven.
Your learners will get a chance to use their investigation skills as they build an ant maze and observe whether or not an ant can make it through. Start by finding a source of ants and then set your bait. Next, set up a series of obstacles that your ant has to get through to get to the bait. Encourage your children to analyze the ants behaviors by asking questions like, "Why did he just turn around?"
Help children learn about density with this mind-bending density experiment. First, teach about liquid density by pouring colored liquids with different densities into a jar and watching them separate. Have students predict which liquids they think will be the least or most dense. Next, learn and make predictions about the density of small objects by letting them take a dive into your layered liquid pond and see which level they sink to and float in.
Teach sound waves to your budding musicians by having them create ear guitars. This simple project, based on the old fashioned tin-can phone, helps students learn about the vibrations of sound waves. This link also has a great explanation of sound waves.
