Curated OER
Get Physically Active
Students discover the importance of water. For this physical education science lesson, students consider mental and physical activities. Students find their pulse and measure their heart rate. Students discuss the importance of water...
Teach Engineering
Preconditioning Balloons: Viscoelastic Biomedical Experiments
What does stretching a balloon have to do with equilibrium? Groups explore preconditioning by stretching a balloon to a point of equilibrium. They then measure the amount of force required to stretch the balloon to the same point several...
Teach Engineering
Stop the Stretching
Stretch your teaching repertoire with an experiment on the elongation (stretching) and failure (break) of several materials. The point of the experiment is to design a composite material for chair webbing.
Curated OER
To stretch or not to stretch
Hands-on is the best way to play. Learners read a graph that shows the force needed to stretch a rubber band. They do this and then participate in a simple experiment where they create coiled springs with wire. They work to determine how...
Teach Engineering
Exploring the Forces of Tension
Let the resource stretch the minds of your young scientists with a lesson about tensile strength and stiffness of materials. Groups consider how easily materials stretch and relate this property to engineering design.
Curated OER
Summer Activities: Our Amazing Bodies
Students use the body as a sensory laboratory to explore their five senses, heartbeat, bones, and even size. In this early childhood science lesson, students build science and critical thinking skills as they take part in up to 6...
Curated OER
Bend It! Stretch It! Squash It!
Some items keep their shape no matter what happens! Have your kindergarten class choose which items would stay the same if they were bent, stretched, or squashed. The last activity prompts kids to see what happens when they stretch a...
NOAA
The Great, Glowing Orb What You Will Do: Make a Solar Heat Engine
How is solar energy able to move wind and water to control the climate? Scholars explore the concept of solar energy in the first of 10 activities in the Discover Your Changing World series. They follow instructions to build homemade...
Polar Trec
Talk Story: A Native Way of Knowing
The steps of the scientific method examine a problem, make a prediction, and attempt to solve the problem—similar to the path most stories take. In the activity, individuals see how stories can explain natural events similar to the way...
Teach Engineering
Challenges of Laparoscopic Surgery
Get some laparoscopic training without the pain with an activity that challenges class members to find out what it is like to perform laparoscopic surgery. Teams perform three different tasks and quantify their performance. The activity...
Curated OER
Darwin’s Bees
What do you call a bee born in May? A maybe! This first instructional activity in a series of four begins with a starter activity to get scholars thinking about the topic. Then a circus, or circuit of seven activities, show Darwin's...
Curated OER
Balloon Blowup Activity
In this science activity worksheet, students will work in small groups to observe and record what happens to balloons after they are placed on flasks and immersed into a warm water bath and an ice water bath.
Newspaper Association of America
Cereal Bowl Science and Other Investigations with the Newspaper
What do cereal, fog, and space shuttles have to do with newspapers? A collection of science investigations encourage critical thinking using connections to the various parts of the newspaper. Activities range from building origami seed...
Captain Planet Foundation
Solar Cooking Race
Study heat transfer with activities that focus on how heat energy works. Using a solar cooker, ice cubes, and heat transfer bracelets, kids experiment and record what they find by keeping ice cubes cold and vegetables hot.
Curated OER
Simple Tensile Testing of Polymeric Films and Sheeting
Chemistry classes pretend to be consultants to a grocery story trying to decide what polymer to use for therir new non-paper bags. They prepare tensile bars and use them to test plastic film samples for strength and stretchability. Both...
Cornell University
The Physics of Bridges
Stability is key when building a bridge. Scholars explore the forces acting upon bridges through an analysis of Newton's Laws and Hooke's Law. The activity asks individuals to apply their learning by building a bridge of their own.
Berkshire Museum
Meet a Naturalist: Researching, Writing, Interviewing
Young scholars reach out into the community and learn about different environmental science careers in this inquiry-based instructional activity. Beginning with a short research assignment, children gain background knowledge about...
Resources for Educators
Fractions of Fun
Reinforce concepts and encourage learner engagement with a collection of math games, science experiments, and cross curricular activities. In one fun resource, learners sort objects, keep a diary of everyday fractions, play a game using...
Exploratorium
Vocal Visualizer
Make sound visible with an activity that provides directions for how to build a vocal visualizer meant to create light patterns. Making noise into the visualizer causes a mirror to vibrate, reflecting a laser beam, and creating the...
Alliance Theater
The Jungle Book Post-Show STEAM Lesson
An ecosystem is really just the flow of energy through many different living organisms. A study of Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book leads to an environmental science activity in which learners study how various factors can affect...
Curated OER
Will it Stretch?
Students explore elasticity and describe the effects of temperature changes on physical properties. In this rubber band stretch lesson students complete an experimental activity and show their results.
Curated OER
Fun Polymer Activity
Students add borax to a latex polymer and play with it to see the characteristics it now contains. In this polymer lesson plan, students see if it stretches, if it's durable, if the molecules break easily, and more.
Curated OER
Be a "Peder-Reader" - A Discovery Activity
Students investigate millipedes. In this math and physics lesson plan, students examine the millipede's physical structure and characteristics by observing its behavior in given activities. Pupils will hypothesize whether they think the...
Curated OER
Rocket Activity
Young scholars explore Newton's Second Law of Motion. In this rocket activity lesson, students experiment with Newton's Second Law of Motion as they use a slingshot device to force a car to move.