If you’re looking for something fun and educational to keep your kids busy during this quarantine, I’ve got you covered! I spent 5 years as a high school and middle school science teacher before deciding to stay home with my son. Of the hundreds of labs I’ve facilitated over the years, I seem to have lost a great deal of my handouts through the move/change in computer, but below I’ve salvaged a handful of activities that I was able to adapt for easy at-home use!
These activities are simplified for upper elementary/middle school aged kids and can most definitely be simplified further for younger kids as well! In addition to these activities, I’ve saved videos of a couple of space-related lab activities to my Instagram highlights under “Space”. I hope these at-home science activities will take a little bit of the pressure off you and teach your kids something in the process!
At-Home Science Activities
Planet Earth:
In this activity, kids will use a candy bar and graham crackers to observe and simulate the composition of the earth and the changes it undergoes as a result!
Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition:
In this activity, kids will prepare an “edible aquifer” in the form of an ice cream sunday. This activity will walk them through how an aquifer functions with each step of creating their ice cream treat!
In this activity, kids will use paper and colored markers to observe how groundwater moves through a watershed! This is an easy and fun activity for any age group!
Skittles Weathering and Erosion Lab
In this activity, kids will observe how water impacts the surface of the earth by using skittles to simulate rock formations.
Plants/ Botany:
This one is pretty self explanatory! Get your kids outside to pick some flowers for this fun flower anatomy dissection!
Anatomy:
In this lab, students will use a balloon to determine the capacity of their lungs through a series of trials and calculations! This lab can be simplified by avoiding the calculation steps to gain a general idea of how lungs work!
This lab is a fun way to get your kids exercising while teaching them how their muscles fatigue with time and use! This would be really fun to play with siblings as they can “compete” with one another!
Ecosystems:
Another fun and productive way to get your kids outside, this nature walk will encourage kids to look specifically for examples of organisms responding to stimuli around them!
Cells:
This lab is really fun and lasts a couple of days! Kids will learn about how water moves through the cell membrane by removing the shell of eggs to expose it to a variety of solutions!
This activity is geared toward upper middle school aged students, but a super fun activity that allows kids to actually extract and observe their OWN DNA! You may need to get creative if you do not have test tubes sitting around, but any similarly shaped clear container should suffice (or you could amazon a quick set of plastic test tubes)!
Space Activities:
Find video tutorials for space related activities on my Instagram highlight labelled “Space”!
Outdoor Solar Energy Activity:
Build a Solar Oven to cook a hot dog!
I don’t have a handout for this one, but this was one of my favorites to do at the end of the school year! Set out a few cardboard containers (pizza boxes, shoeboxes, etc.), aluminum foil, packing tape, skewers (optional), saran wrap, etc. and ask your kids to “construct a solar oven” that can cook a hot dog! If your kids are younger you can build one together (pizza box with a hole cut in the top works best but you can put your heads together and experiment with it to accomplish the task). The inquiry process of designing the “solar oven” is the most productive thing about this activity, so if your kids are old enough, I encourage you to provide them with the space and means to explore! (Here’s a very low quality photo of my very first class and our “solar cookout” with our homemade solar ovens! Back when I was “Ms. Meier”…)
As I discover more of my lost lab handouts, I will be sure to share them with you! I hope this collection of activities is a start and will offer your family some educational fun over the next couple of weeks! If you do complete an activity, I would love to see how it went! Tag me in your Instagram stories/posts so I can see your kids enjoying the educational fun! ( @kelsiebrownblog )
Kelsie
