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Make these homemade shell fossils and introduce your child to the wonders of science! This activity would be a great way to end a unit on fossil imprints. This activity would allow the students to understand how fossils can be made, even if it isn't authentic. The experiment would keep the students interested and would gain their attention. I would allow my students to find objects that have great texture, and allow them to press down in the clay to see how it looks after it hardens. Once the clay hardened, I would hang them up on the wall for my students to be able to look at them.

This lesson explores the life cycle and traits of pumpkins. The class first makes a flip chart that shows the life cycle of a pumpkin. The next day the class could go to a local pumpkin patch and pair up with a partner to investigate one pumpkin per group. They would look at how many lines are on each pumpkin, the texture of the pumpkin and the color. Then the class would come back and create a graph to show what they discovered in the pumpkin patch. This is a great way to show the students the life cycle of a pumpkin and allow them to see that every pumpkin has unique traits.

I wanted to step it up a notch since I loved Dr. Hope's Oobleck lesson plan. I discovered this on pinterest and it is actually Oobleck that moves. This activity incorporates both the texture of the oobleck and the unique sound waves/vibrations that make sound waves. Students ears and fingers will be stunned as they watch and hear the oobleck slide through their fingertips. This experiment can create multiple leading questions, an investigation, and a lengthy discussion.

This activity helps provide students with a simple understanding of why there are different types of soil. The students will be given a chewy chocolate chip cookie, and a regular crunchy one. They will examine each cookie and describe their characteristics and properties. Next, the students will smash the cookies with their hands to replicate the process of rocks weathering. Now that they have soil, they will compare the properties of both types of soil and form conclusions. Using a chewy chocolate chip cookie and a crunchy one represents the different minerals found in soils, and how it impacts its appearance, texture, and many other characteristics. Once the students have completed this activity, they will be able to enjoy a cookie! I selected this resource because I think it is a very straight forward way of learning about the different types of soils. Using these types of cookies really makes the concept easier to understand. This activity will not cost a lot of money, which makes it very valuable to me. We will do this activity at the end of our soil lesson in science.

This lesson involves using balloons to explain the difference between a solid, liquid, and gas. Before beginning the lesson, the teacher needs to have three identical balloons--one filled with a gas, one filled with a liquid, and one filled with a solid. Students would then be allowed to explore and compare certain traits of the different balloons such as weight, texture, and fragility. After exploring these many differences with students, the teacher could then explain to them the properties of a solid, a liquid, and a gas. This activity caught my attention because it was a cheap, easy, hands-on way for students to actively explore the differences between a solid, liquid, and gas. I would use this activity as a catchy introduction to a lesson on matter. (Although the creator of this activity used it for his/her preschool-aged children, I believe that it can be a great tool for the elementary classroom as well.)

For this activity, ask the students what they think will happen if you heat a bar of ivory soap in the microwave. Make a graph of their predictions on the smartboard. Then heat the bar of ivory soap in the microwave for one minute. After you show the students what happened to the soap. Allow them to hold pieces of the "cloud" and make observations about texture and why they think the soap formed into a cloud. I chose this activity because this teacher also has a unit on weather connected to this activity that includes daily weather observations, non-fiction passages and writing organizers.

Who knew!? Very cool and surprising outcome. I am a little concerned that this activity might lead students away from true understanding of the formation of clouds, though. What do you think?