The Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility, also known as Jefferson Lab, is a world-leading nuclear physics research facility funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. They have put together a great site offering over two dozen online educational games that aren’t full of shoot-em-ups and fancy graphics — but are very well designed… fun… and highly educational.

Included are COOL games about the Periodic Table of Elements… the truly fun and challenging Speed Math game, and other logic and science puzzles that are great additions to your homechool repertoire. Click on over and bookmark this!

CLICK HERE to go to the website!

Here’s a terrific hands-on science site for you, chock full of dozens more activities, experiments and fun and games for young students.

from the site:

Love My Science is full of fun, easy, safe and exciting hands-on science experiments as well as fun facts and Science topics that will help you answer a lot of questions asked by your children. Do your kids ask a lot of questions? Kids are natural scientists – they learn by asking questions. Science is all around us in our daily living and the more you do and observe; the more fascinated you will become in finding answers.

Scientists learn about the world we live in by carrying out all sorts of investigations and are very organized and very careful people. When they work, they plan: write down what they used, what they did and what happened. It is a good idea for you to keep a notebook throughout. You can write about what you are doing step-by-step, what your observations were and remember how you came to discover the results. You can write:

Your Aim – Why do you want to do this? What hypothesis are you going to test? you want to find out why A is good but B is not so good?

Your Method – What are you going to do or test? Make labels and/or diagrams to help keep your method in order.

Your Result – Be sure to observe things happening and record measurements. Sometimes it is a good idea to record your results in a table or chart.

(We really like the above suggestions to keep a record of your experiments and results. Haven’t seen that on other “experiments” sites.)

Activities here are categorized by topic, by field of study, and alphabetically. Lots of extras too, making this a good site to bookmark and use throughout the year.

Click here to go to the site!

Demoworks – The Fine Art of Materials Demonstrations

Here’s a great ebook of over 40 science demonstrations from the now offline Strange Matter Exhibit website (link is to the archived version of the site). It was created by a Yale materials science professor as a teaching resource for her introductory class, and most of these materials demonstrations can be easily used in a homeschool setting or the more complicated ones as a larger science fair project. These experiments demonstrate many different properties of materials including magnetic, electrical, optical, thermal, structural, kinetic and mechanical properties, and more. Objectives, materials, procedures, explanations and references are provided with each demo.

To download the PDF ebook,  CLICK HERE, then click on the download icon at the top of the archive page.

How does it work? What makes it go? What’s the science behind it? If those are the kinds of questions you like to ask, “Explain That Stuff” is the right place to go.

Explain that Stuff is an online book written by British science writer Chris Woodford (author of many popular science books for adults and children). It includes 450 easy-to-understand articles (plus over 2000 photos and 1000 illustrations), covering how things work, cutting-edge science, cool gadgets, and computers. (Their motto: “We take the “pain” from explain and the “tough” out of stuff!”) There’s more information on this website than in your average expensive science book, it’s continually updated, and it’s completely free to use. Highly recommended!

Click here to go to the site!