Creative science supplements

[LauraClark]

I'm looking for creative ideas on making our science "stick" a little more (2nd and 4th grade).  I'd like something tangible.  In history we have been creating lapbooks and this next year I want to really encourage their creativity with it and have them create their own pages based on what we read.  All that to say, they might be tired of lapbooks for our science days.  TWTM suggests experiment papers, and we can do some of them, but if we did one for each science lesson they would hate science (too much writing).  Our book has questions after each lesson and this year we answered them, but I'd rather see them do something more fun and creative.  Ideas?

 

(We're using Berean Builders Science in the Beginning.)

[8filltheheart]

Not creative and not experiments, but my kids have always made little "chapter books" on science topics: dinosaurs, solar system, trees, life cycle of a frog, etc.  Each "chpt" is a page with an illustration and either a caption or a few sentences to a paragraph (depends on the age).  

[Lori D.]

- education videos?
Magic School Bus videos (and other educational videos) went over very well at that age, and tended to help the main science idea of the episode to "stick" -- no tangible product, though.

- science kits?
Pre-made kits are easy to hand off, and the physical "doing" can help science info/processes "stick" for some kids. Often it is the self-discovery of the process that makes science "stick" for kids -- like, how to engineer something to make it work, or the "what happens when I do this..." Also, "fun things" tend to help facts and processes stick -- kitchen chemistry hands-on activities are especially fun. Highly memorable activities can also help info stick -- we dissected owl pellets and sheep eyeballs, made our own fossils, and used a kit to make our own paper -- all done in the early elementary grades -- DSs talked about some of those activities for years after.

- video/hands-on combo?
Perhaps a combo of education videos + activity -- PBS Zoom (the show), + doing physical science, chemistry, engineering, nature, human biology activities done by the kids on Zoom.

- field trips?
Science museums, planetariums, aquariums, caves and other natural wonders, visitor's centers for nature/hiking trails... A lot of these places have hands-on activities or demos that can make information and processes more visual to both embed in the memory, but also to *see* it sometimes helps with the "a-ha" moment of understanding. Tangible product could be photos from participating, and children provide captions.

- photo scrapbook?
What about taking & printing a photo of various things you do with your science lesson and make it a scrapbook sort of lap book -- kids can dictate to you a caption of what the key science idea was that is represented in the photo. Or 8FillTheHeart's idea of drawing a picture and captioning it.

- do a long term project?
How about spending a several weeks on a long-term science fair project or investigation of the child's interest, where the child has to make regular observations? Repetition helps cement science facts and information, and you end up with a tangible end-product. Our city has an annual Science Fair with categories for each grade/age-division, and lots of support info for participating.

For several years in the late elementary grades, DSs would do a project to show at the county fair -- one year they worked together and made a display board with marshmallow + toothpick models of molecules, with captions; another year D#1 made a scale model of the Sears Tower (now the Willis Tower). 

- project as a group?
Doing a project with a group can make it more memorable and -- robotics team, for example, or small co-op group project where they work together to engineer a bridge or tower or marble run...

One annual project that I started for our homeschool support group was an "Egg Drop". DH worked at the fire dept, and we would schedule a morning to go down there and every kid who wanted to participate spent the week before engineering and building a contraption to hold a raw egg, and then the fire crew took all of the contraptions up to the top of the extended ladder on the ladder truck (about 90 feet), and dropped each one. Building contraptions was done solo by families at home, but I provided links to info for anyone who wanted to research ideas about cushioning or slowing rate of descent, and it was a bit of a group project in that everyone was rooting for everyone else and their contraption to be successful.

Edited May 16, 2020 by Lori D.