Kids love hands-on activities. It’s a great way to learn, and it’s especially appropriate for science lessons. When children have the opportunity to experience a concept through active involvement, they’re much more likely to remember what they’ve learned.
If you’d like to get your child involved in some hands-on science, you have several choices. You can purchase good quality lab materials, you can buy inexpensive kits matched to your unit of study (The Wild Goose kits work well for elementary age students and are usually priced under $10.00), or you can improvise with common household items and put together your own homeschool science curriculum. In fact, you probably have most everything you need for hundreds of science experiments in your home right now.
Inexpensive Science Materials
When you ask your kids to use a small plastic lid as a Petri dish, a transparent film canister as a test tube, or sugar to create crystals, the concept you’re teaching not only comes through loud and clear, it’s made even more memorable because you’re creating a new use for ordinary items. If possible, group your activities around one concept such as studying the principles of water, air, sound, electricity, etc. That way, many of the materials you gather for one activity can be reused in another, making less work for you.
Want an example of what you can teach with inexpensive supplies? Try a science lesson using the pinwheel described below. It can be used with units on air, energy, weather, or water (turn it into a water wheel by laminating it).
Construct a Pinwheel
Supplies:
- Pencil with eraser intact
- Construction paper (or other heavy paper)
- Thumb tack
- Scissors
- ruler
Instructions:
With a ruler, draw a 6 inch by 6 inch square on the construction paper. In the very center of that square, draw another square 1 inch by 1 inch. If you find it difficult to center the smaller square, you can use the ruler to get it exact, but absolute precision isn’t necessary.
With scissors, cut a diagonal line from each of the four corners of the larger square to the nearest corner of the smaller square. Be careful not to cut beyond the small square. When you’ve finished cutting, your square should resemble the picture below.
Now your square has four triangular shaped sections. Gently lift one section and examine
it. The left and right side of each outer edge forms a point. Work your way around the square, bending the left edge of each triangle down toward the center of the smaller square. They will overlap in the center. Do not crease the folds.
Complete your pinwheel by pushing a thumbtack through the gathered edges, the back of the pinwheel, and into the top of the pencil’s eraser. Do not press the tack tightly into the eraser. Your pinwheel needs room to spin.
Blow gently to test the spin. Adjust the tack if necessary. Your new pinwheel can now be used to illustrate a number of principles regarding air, wind speed, wind direction, etc.
With a few adjustments, it can even be made to do work. (Tighten the tack snugly into the eraser, slip a piece of tubing larger than the diameter of the pencil over the pencil shaft and tie a 2’ piece of string just below the metal trim at the base of the eraser. Attach a large paper clip as a weight to the opposite end of the string. Hold the pinwheel by the tubing. Now when air turns the pinwheel, the pencil will spin too, causing the string to wrap around it and lift the weight.)
Teaching science through hands on activities is a fun experience for everyone involved. And it doesn’t have to cost a lot of money--it just takes a little planning and a sense of adventure.
