Curated OER
Your Five Senses
Students identify the five senses. In this biology lesson, students participate in an experiment and use their five senses to identify various substances.
Curated OER
Weather instruments
Students explore weather instruments. For this weather lesson, students make rain gauges, anemometers, and barometers following the instructions given in the lesson. Students set up a weather station using their instruments and record...
Curated OER
Balls & Hoops : Fun with Balls and Tubes
Students race to keep these balls rolling. In this early childhood physical education lesson, students experiment with cause and effect as they work with different heights of cardboard tubes.
Curated OER
Boxes & Blocks: Tunnel Vision
Students paint, create, and crawl through their own tunnel. For this early childhood visual arts lesson, students will develop gross motor skills and engage in activities that promote physical exercise as they create and explore tunnels...
Curated OER
Boxes & Blocks: Puffer Bellies and Box Cars
Students turn cardboard boxes into outdoor dramatic play. In this early childhood visual arts lesson plan, students explore cooperative and dramatic play outdoors by challenging children to create a train from cardboard boxes.
Curated OER
Sort It Out
Elementary schoolers engage in a game of logical reasoning called Secret Sort. A Venn diagram is used as a way to sort objects. This resource would be a great way to introduce the Venn diagram (maybe the most famous, and most-useful...
Curated OER
Making Music
Budding musicians engage in an exciting lesson which has them make musical instruments out of ordinary household items. By using paper plates, plastic cups, rubber bands, storage containers, and wooden spoons they make a variety of...
Curated OER
Water Experiment
Here is a great lesson designed for very young scientists. In it, they act out the famous Aesops fable, "The Crow and the Pitcher." In doing this, they get to experience water displacement first-hand. Some terrific extension activities...
Curated OER
Thumbprints
Thumbprints are fascinating! Here is a clever lesson that allows kids to discover that everyone has a unique thumbprint - no two are alike! They use magnifying glasses to closely observe their own, and someone else's thumbprints. Then,...
Curated OER
Skate Borders
Elementary schoolers explore how making different rectangular shapes with the same perimeter has an affect on the area of those shapes. Learners use the worksheet embedded in the plan to design their own skateboarding track. They use...
Curated OER
Shoe Box Turtles
Turtles are the stars of the show in a creative lesson plan designed for very young learners. In it, learners are shown pictures of real turtles. They discuss the shell and the head, then they compare them to other animals. Pupils are...
PBS
Patterns to the Rescue!
Track down the Cyberchase episode that this lesson is associated with. Using a worksheet that is embedded in the plan, learners must find the next two numbers and shapes (a double pattern). Once these have been discovered, pupils try...
Curated OER
Magnet Circus
Students explore the properties of magnets by designing a device that can move as far as possible using only magnets to move it, and design a machine that will stay in motion for the greatest period of time.
Curated OER
Motion Commotion!
Young scholars explore the drawings of Rube Goldberg to design and construct a simple machine. They discuss simple machines, and using various materials and toy parts, design and construct a "Rube Goldberg" style machine to ring a bell.
Curated OER
Freestanding Structures: A Tech Museum Floor Activity
Students attempt to design the tallest structure that they can with the given materials which are wooden dowels and rubber bands. They discuss the physics of their structure and how they would improve it the next time they built a...
Curated OER
Exploring Buoyancy
Students use materials found at a resource table to design simple devices that will house instruments to take water samples from a tub of water. They design 3 instruments, each varying in density so that one will float, one will hover...
Curated OER
Building for the Big One
Students build and test structures that can best withstand earthquakes. They create their structures from playdough, cornstarch, grape-nuts and popsicle sticks and place their structures on a "shake table."
Curated OER
Peanut Math
I really like this clever lesson on using peanuts to help facilitate the learning of addition and subtraction for your young mathematicians. Youngsters use peanuts as "counters" for a variety of math problems that include greater than...
Curated OER
Peanuts and Peanut Butter
The peanut takes center stage in this science lesson for young learners. In it, pupils label the parts of the peanut plant. They discover that the peanut is actually the fruit of a plant that has developed underground. Some really fun...
Curated OER
Root Structures
Plant roots are the focus here. Pupils discover that some plants actually store food in their roots, that roots provide water for plants, and that gravity and sunlight have an effect on plants. This terrific, six-page plan has two...
Utah Education Network (UEN)
Geo Shapes
Invite your first graders to compose and decompose two and three-dimensional figures with this fun, hands-on instructional activity. They investigate and predict the results of putting together and taking apart two-dimensional shapes...
Curated OER
Power Play
Once your physical science stars have a grasp of the different forms of energy, use this resource to get them putting the energy to work. Small groups choose from seven different project options and work together to build an energy...
Curated OER
What's in a Graph?
How many yellow Skittles® come in a fun-size package? Use candy color data to construct a bar graph and a pie chart. Pupils analyze bar graphs of real-life data on the Texas and Massachusetts populations. As an assessment at the end of...
Curated OER
Extract DNA from a Banana
Your scientists-in-training extract DNA from a banana. Then, they wrap it around a glass rod in order to view the threads of DNA. They draw their observations.