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A chemistry unit with many lessons that are related to projects. The students are able to explore different explorations in six ways. This helps students become more engaged in the lessons on learning about the fundamentals of chemistry. Using these activities will help students in the future since they will know the beginning aspects of chemistry.

There are five large oceans on Earth: the Atlantic, the Pacific, the Indian, the Arctic and the Southern (or Antarctic) Oceans. They are really one 'world ocean' a continuous expanse of water with the continents of the world like big islands of land in this. This is a perfect website to have as a resource when teaching about the oceans and seas. The website is packed with very rich information and great visuals over ocean currents, layers, and waves! Besides talking about the usual oceans topics like ocean life or level of the ocean floor, it covers topics that are less discussed in the classroom. Example from the website includes mapping the ocean floor, threats to oceans, and even fisheries. Another great feature about this website is that it includes an experience over ocean currents. Overall, the website can defiantly be a great source to add to the curriculum! Ways to implement this website into the classroom would be by doing the ocean current experiment with the class. Also, I know that the ocean is still one of the main mysteries to scientist to this day, so I think there is plenty of opportunities for students to use their creative minds. Examples of projects would be have students create what they think animals and plants look like that are undiscovered. The topic of oceans and seas is very broad and fascinating!

Remove "science" tag and re-tag as "earth science" to be more specific. Is this a lesson, activity, background information, field trip, etc.? Tag accordingly.

This activity shows how a cloud makes rain. For this activity you fill up a jar most of the way with water. Top the water with shaving cream. Drip food coloring into the shaving cream until eventually it fills up and starts dripping through the shaving cream. I chose this activity because there are a few simple items needed, shaving cream, water, jar, food coloring which could be found around the home and would be interesting for children. This would help simplify the understanding of clouds producing rain for young children. This activity can be used during the studying clouds/weather I would use during the lesson while explaining how clouds make rain for a visual.

This lesson is so simple and adorable! It's about teaching students the types of clouds and precipitation. It gives a very simple and eye friendly teacher outline for the types of clouds and directions for a demonstration. I think this project could be taken down or up a few notches to match the age group someone was teaching. It's a very wonderful lesson for active and visual learners. It provides a bit of hands on involvement and visual demonstrations about rain fall. I would use this lesson to teach to my class as a whole, but I would love to put my student's into groups to do the experiment. I think it would be a good time for them to practice the scientific process that we would've previously discussed, by allowing them to think critically and predict what would happen to the food coloring droplets and so on.

This website has 5 different experiments that students can do with plants. The experiments test the effects of light, water, food, talking to the plants, and soil content on the growth of plants. I selected this source because I think the experiments are good and will help students understand the best conditions of plants. It will help them understand that there are other components besides light and water that go into the growth of a plant. I would use this resource during a plant unit, likely in 3rd or 4th grade. This would be an ongoing project that could integrate measurement in math, graphing (with and without use of technology), and art (by drawing observations).  

I love this one! I really like plant experiments becuase these days, kids don't really get to appreicate and witness actual plant growth. I would any of these as ideas to use in my classroom.

Experiments for very early learners may be a little hard to think of. This page is full of ideas with materials you will need, ways to tie it all together, and how to get the students to understand the big picture.

Many of these are more crafts projects than experiments, although they have potential linkages to science.

This activity can be used in conjunction with a lesson on rock formation. Each rock is formed through different processes and made up of varying materials. This project lets the students make there own sedimentary rock and observe closely how they are made up of different materials held together by one material.

This lesson/activity introduces students to interesting new topics such as the ecosystem, the Artic peninsula, and the food chain. All of these topics come together through the discussion of animals from the Arctic sea and how they live and thrive based off of each other. First the general animal life of the Arctic sea is discussed, then a broken down description of each animal in that particular food chain is provided. The students are able to cut out and color these pictures, and make their own mobiles to help them remember the food chain in the ecosystem. I chose this lesson/activity because I think it had a good mixture of knowledge and activity which allows the students to learn without even realizing it. Animals eating each other tend to be exciting to younger students, and by explaining these topics they will be able to understand wildlife a bit better. This is a great source to use during an ecosystem unit, that will make the class interested in learning the new material and excited about the project at the end.

Magic School Bus activity that gives directions for creating a decay bottle out of soda bottle. I would use this for exploring decomposition with elementary students. They can observe it happening instead of guessing!! Yay!

For this activity you would need a glove, 5 cotton balls, and 5 different types of plant seeds. Label the fingers of the gloves, wet the cotton ball but rid the excess water, place one seed and one cotton ball in the correctly labeled finger of the glove and watch the seeds grow. You can plant cotton ball and seed in garden once they sprout. I chose this because I think that kids really enjoy growing their own plants. I have worked with children and done this before and they love to check on them daily and then be able to take home and grow. I also chose this because each individual child gets their own plants and individual participation for fairly inexpensive project. As we begin a lesson on plants, we would plant our own plants to watch them grown throughout the unit. We would also be able to journal about our plants and their changes over time.

This lesson involves watching plants grow from seeds. Students use a glove and place one seed in each of the fingers and thumb. A damp cotton ball is added to hydrate the seeds as they grow. Students can watch their seeds grow into seedlings and eventually transplant elsewhere to become full grown plants. I would add some things to this lesson (such as a daily or weekly journal to document the growth of the seeds). I chose this because during an observation I saw this lesson in action! The students (grade 1) loved it and were excited to see what their seeds were doing each day and excited to know that when the seedlings were big enough, they would be planting them outside their school. It's valuable to me because I think it's important for students to understand the plant cycle and to appreciate the act of growing things (not just trees or flowers, but we can grow our food too!) I would use this lesson with different books to get the students engaged; I would use journals to monitor and make predictions about our seedlings as well.

This website shows lesson plans for 4th grade science classes. This came from the uen.org website which several of us used for our lesson plan analysis project. I think they do a thorough job of planning their lessons and presenting appropriate demonstrations.

The website is a great resource for any elementary school teacher. It is broken down into sections such as organization, search engines, games, activities, etc. While I obviously didn't look at all 100, the ones I did look at seemed like they had great potential. The organization section seemed especially promising because I struggle with keeping things organized. It has websites similar to diigo to provide you with more ideas and inspiration. I think this will be a great starting point for any new lesson that I decide to try. Picking any of the 100 sites is sure to bring up something helpful. It includes free audiobooks, body maps, worksheets, electronic field-trips, etc.

I found several of the links to be faulty--leading to old sites no longer functioning, or to sites that looked questionable. However, I did also find Climate Zone, which allows you to use a clickable map to select a region of the world, and then a country, for which the site then provides latitude, longitude, and climate information about the location. This would be a good resource for students researching regions of the world or biomes.

The water cycle describes how Earth's water is not only always changing forms, between liquid (rain), solid (ice), and gas (vapor), but also moving on, above, and in the Earth. This process is always happening everywhere. Back to the water cycle diagram for students. This website can be very functional when teaching about the water cycle. It has a great diagram with clear illustration, words, and even descriptions for a beginner, intermediate, and advance levels. The diagram itself is kind of whimsical and I think the young grades will really be engaged. It also offers detailed descriptions of the different parts of the water cycle in the side bar. This resource would be very valuable when explaining the water cycle. I think teachers could incorporate the diagram during a lesson. Also, they could do informal assessments on the students by having students come up to the smart board and pointing out certain parts of the cycle. Or it could even be a guide for students when they draw their own water cycle for their notes or for a project. Overall, the diagram and the extra explanations over the water cycle can really be helpful in the classroom.

Teaching Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) Engineering Design Through Media is a collection of activities and professional development resources drawn from programs such as WGBH's Design Squad Nation and the Engineering is Elementary® project at the Museum of Science, Boston. Add your description and what you like/why you chose this resource. How would you use it?

This activity is a great way to review what animals need to survive. We will do this project at the end of our animal lesson. Students will already know what animals need in order to survive. For this activity, students will fill in their foldable with the correct needs of animals and draw a picture to go along with each need. I chose this activity because foldables are very popular in elementary grades. Having the students write the needs on a foldable instead of a regular piece of paper makes the activity more fun for them. They also love to color, so they will be excited to draw pictures! These foldables would be very cute to display in the classroom, but are also easy for students to store in their desks and refer back to them later.

It is really easy to paste these kinds of foldables into science notebooks for long-term keeping, too!

This lesson helps the students understand and explore what technology is and how it's so much more than "computers." It will also give them the chance to study the history throughout America's past time. I think this lesson would be awesome to have a history tie-in simply because they can possibly make a timeline as a class, each student receiving an item and having to research the inventor and how it changed how people operated certain things. i.e. light bulb, electricity, cars, computers, phones, etc. They will use computers and tablets for their research. This way they're using technology to learn about technology.

"Two similar plants are observed as one gets regular water and the other does not." This science lesson and activity can benefit students in so many ways. Students will be observing and making comparisons among two plants as one plant receives water and the other does not. Throughout this week-long project, the students will be coming up with their own theories about what will happen to each of these plants. Along with this, they will be comparing and contrasting their observations and the final results. I believe that students would love an activity like this, and it would be extremely beneficial to them as they learn how living things change and depend on their environment to satisfy their basic needs.