Science Experiments in the Classroom

Do your kiddos love hands on science experiments as much as mine do?! Let's face it, our little learners love to play. Science experiments are fun! If you do it just right, kids think they are doing nothing more than playing. What they really are doing is experiencing learning with real world application. 

As much as I love doing experiments in class, sometimes they just.don't.work. I don't have a hot plate to bring to school to melt my chocolate to show how matter changes from one state to another. I don't have an incubator to show my kiddos the life cycle of a chicken. I don't have tiny little race cars to show students the relationship between force and motion. So what do teachers do?... They improvise! If you ever feel like me and have that constant battle between wanting students to experience things in real life and having little to no materials to make that happen here are a couple of things I do instead...

Perform experiments at home and take pictures {or videotape yourself if you're brave}. 

I took these pictures at home, then created a quick Power Point to show my class. As I went through the Power Point, students recorded what they saw and made predictions of what would happen next based on prior knowledge they had. The kiddos were super excited {and surprised} to see me pull out the finished product for them to sample!

Use YouTube! Here is a video that I use to show how trees change from one season to the next.

Neither of these ideas are new, but are just some of the things I use in my classroom to make.it.work!

Teacher confession: Sometimes it overwhelms me trying to figure out how to manage and gather the supplies. At my school, teachers don't get supplies for experiments. Anything we need to perform an experiment has to be bought by the teacher. I'm super lucky in that I have wonderful parents that are willing to donate supplies and/or volunteer their time to our classroom! I use SignUp Genius to help me organize my supplies. It is so easy to use and helps me to stay organized!

Now, I did have the opportunity to perform many experiments with my class. Thanks to parents for donating supplies and coming in to help us with our experiments, our week of matter fun went off without a hitch!

{All experiments come from Hope King's matter unit that you can find here.}