Home Science Experiments!University of Wisconsin-Madison Chemistry Professor Bassam Z. Shakhashiri shares the fun of science through this way cool page which contains dozens of fascinating and fun science experiments you can easily do at home. These are tried-and-true kid pleasers, and are all great fun! Check them out and bookmark the site!
CLICK HERE to go to the site
Here’s a complete Elementary level “Life Science” curriculum for younger students by Scot McQuerry (aka Mr. Q), with both student and parent ebooks provided. Very colorful, playfully designed and written — this should be a hit with your littles!
Click here to go to the download page.
Tip: Scroll down the page, the downloads are there!
Using Children’s Literature to Teach Science by Patricia Bishop McKean (PDF ebook with multiple PDF files)
Patricia Bishop McKean compiled this wonderful ebook that pairs great picture books / young reader books (including such classics as Stellaluna, Follow the Drinking Court, Swimmy, Curious George, Morris’s Disappearing Bag and many more) with hands-on activities that demonstrate basic science concepts to young students. Subjects covered in the activities include earth science, astronomy, math, ecology, physics, chemistry, and process skills. It’s a great approach that makes both the stories AND the science lessons much more memorable.
From her introduction:
Each children’s picture book is linked to a simple, basic science activity. By showing teachers how to “hook” their students by reading a familiar or new story and then doing a related hands-on, minds-on science activity, I have helped teachers feel more comfortable with teaching science. Sometimes the story comes before the activity, and sometimes it comes after the activity. The activity will stand alone, as will the reading of the story, but if the hook captivates the mind of the student, the memory of the science concept should last in the student’s mind.
About the format:
Each book & accompanying science activity has its own PDF file, so there’s lots of PDFs to download here, making it a little more complicated than just downloading a single PDF file. But it is worth the effort. Check it out and see if you don’t agree. Use the menu on the site to navigate between sections of the collection.
CLICK HERE to go to the website!
TheHappyHousewife.com has a great collection of almost 100 hands-on projects, crafts and experiments especially for homeschoolers, on all sorts of interesting topics, including:
Turkey Feather Science
Testing for Starch
Milk Fireworks
The Physics of the Trapeze
Fun Ways to Improve Writing Skills
Buoyancy Experiments
…and dozens more.
CLICK HERE Take a look and browse through the collection yourself!
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.
Welcome to Frostbite Theater, a collection of Liquid Nitrogen Experiment videos + More Cool Stuff, produced by Jefferson Lab!
Have you ever wanted to play with liquid nitrogen, but didn’t happen to have any lying around the house? No problem! Since liquid nitrogen is a hazardous substance that should not be handled by homeschool students anyway, the folks at the Jefferson Lab did the experiments and filmed them for your viewing pleasure. Their website has over 30 “cool” videos to check out. They are fun to watch, are only a couple minutes each, and you’ll learn a lot in the process.
(There’s also a bonus collection of Static Electricity Experiments and Experiments that You Can Do at Home on this page!)
Click here to go to the videos!
Here’s a link to almost 150 great science experiments for kids from the Relentlessly Fun, Deceptively Educational blog. These simple, fun, hands-on activities are easy to put together, your kids will actually enjoy them, and they will learn something too. Check it out!
The Museum of Vision put together this wonderful ebook a few years ago on how our eyes work, and how they can be tricked by perspective, persistence of vision, and other phenomena
This ebook is chock full of great illustrations, fascinating optical illusions, and “hands on” learning activities and projects that will appeal to students of all ages. Highly recommended!
To download the PDF ebook directly from the Internet Archive, CLICK HERE!
