Tag: activities

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Questions for Young Scientists to Ask

These are great starting points to work on the scientific method with your student.  For elementary students, these are great springboards from which to use the scientific method.   You can develop an experiment to go with each of these questions (and we will post them here in coming weeks).  Complete a worksheet like the ones included at the bottom of this post, and you have just begun your Science Notebook.   Have fun!

  1. At what temperature does water boil?   Freeze?
  2. How could you separate water and sand?
  3. Does a light bulb give off heat?
  4. Does aluminum foil keep in heat?
  5. Can the sun cook food?
  6. Does the soil get warm when the sun shines on it?
  7. How does the ice cream freeze?
  8. How many colors are there in light (sunlight)?
  9. How fast do seeds germinate?  Different kinds of seeds?  At different temperatures?
  10. Can you grow plants from parts of plants?
  11. Do plants need light?
  12. Where does the water go that watered the plants?
  13. What are the parts of a flower?
  14. Does pollution hurt plants?  (Acid rain)
  15. How does gravity work on a plant?
  16. What are the parts of a corn plant?
  17. Does carbon dioxide (CO2) help a plant to grow?

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National Public Lands Day

According to their website, National Public Lands Day is “the nation’s largest hands-on volunteer effort to improve and enhance the public lands Americans enjoy. In 2009, 150,000 volunteers built trails and bridges, removed trash and invasive plants, planted trees and restored our water resources.”  And it’s tomorrow!  On September 25, 2010, there will be a nationwide collaborative project to restore and support public lands.  By clicking here to go to the NPLD website, you can enter your zip code and find a project in which to participate tomorrow.  Where we live, I found weed removal, trash pickup, trail construction, creek clean-up, fishing access improvement, shoreline stabilization, construction of hardened fishing sites, forest restoration, and more.  If you have nothing planned tomorrow and you want to do some work on public lands, now is your chance! 

And if that isn’t quite your speed, in celebration of National Public Lands Day, the national parks are opening their doors for free admission.  If you live near one, head on out and enjoy! 

And if this all sounds great, but its just too short notice, like for our family, head on over here and become a fan on facebook so you can get advance notice for next year!

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Our First Science Experiment!

Ok, a little background..  I was homeschooled, my mom wrote many of the books in the Castle Heights Press curriculum.  However, up until now, this very week, I have not had the chance to teach science to my children.  So… now we are homeschooling, and my oldest is in preschool.  We are using Alpha Omega’s Horizons preschool, which has great content for character building, Biblical application, and preparation for reading and writing.  I especially appreciate how the curriculum integrates all the subjects with the scripture being studied.  We are working through week 5, and studying the second day of creation, wherein God created an expanse (the sky) to separate waters from waters.  The curriculum uses this verse to begin to study air, the content of air, animals and plants that need air, uses of air (to inflate things, the wind, to breathe, etc.)

So for science, the activity was to boil water on the stove, producing steam, and noting that the boiling water was putting water into the air in the form of water vapor.  On this particular day, we didn’t see the steam very well, so we used a mirror to hold over the boiling water to produce visible condensation.

Now that was about the extent of the activity in Horizons, but we took it one step further, by printing an observation sheet from My First Science Notebook.  With crayons in hand while the water boiled, my son (with a fair amount of coaching) was able to sketch the pot of boiling water with steam being produced, and (my mother would be proud) we labeled it very scientifically.

A quick plug:  Using My First Science Notebook, you can take activities such as this one and practice the skills of science, in this case Observation.  In the book, there are also worksheets to practice Recording, Measuring, and Reporting.  We used the e-Book version of My First Science Notebook to print 13 blank drawing worksheets for use in upcoming science experiments.  The book is for K-3, but as you can see here, with some coaching and patience, it can be started early!

I linked this blog post to Preschool Corner, where there are lots of other little preschoolers doing science experiments!