Sail to the ground with a parachute activity! Kids construct parachutes out of household items and a toy figure, after brainstorming the best way to reduce drag. Once they test their parachutes, they can adjust their projects to...

Flutter, dome, mushroom, tent, jell-o, popcorn, volcano, floating cloud, and mashed potatoes. What do these terms have in common? They are all things to do in a parachute activity. Check out this activity, the pictures included with the...

Drop a perfect project into your lesson plans. Groups use different building materials to create models of parachutes for food drops. After testing out their prototypes, they make improvements to their designs.

This lesson certainly will not be a drag! Little engineers design parachutes that make use of air resistance and, as a result, slow the descent of the payload as much as possible. It is an opportunity to teach about many motion concepts:...

Beware the falling fruit. Scholars design and build parachutes that can help protect fruit as it falls. They test out their creations, learning about gravity, weight, air resistance, and measurement concepts along the way.

Motion is the focus of ten hands-on activities that challenge scholars to build machines invented by Leonardo da Vinci. Following several steps, small groups work collaboratively to recreate machines including levers, pulleys, wheels,...

The classic egg-drop experiment gets a new bounce with an activity that asks pairs to design a lander similar to one used to land a rover on Mars within a fixed budget. The activity provides a great introduction to the idea of...

Watch out below! Future engineers come up with methods to ensure that a ball in a cup stays in the cup even after dropped from a given height. It might be prudent to include some kind of shock absorber in the cup. Parachutes are a good...

Get things moving with this elementary science unit on simple machines. Through a series of nine lessons including teacher demonstrations, hands-on activities, and science experiments, young scientists learn about forces, motion,...

How does a society influence and shape individuals? Class members ponder this essential question as they read Lord of the Flies, as well as primary source materials about the historical background of the novel. As a...

You have to crack a few eggs to make a good engineer! Working in small groups, young scholars design, build, and test devices that protect an egg from breaking when dropped from a ladder.

Children with special needs participate in several activities to reinforce shape and color recognition. They sign the word leaf, sing a song about leaves, and bounce leaves around on a parachute. They then help the instructor name...

Challenge small groups to build a structure that catches a raw egg without breaking—working collaboratively and applying mathematical and engineering principles. Pretending the frame was made by a business, scholars create a marketing...