Summer Science: Introduction

It’s summer! School’s out, kids! When I was teaching, I learned that teachers love summer just as much as kids. However, after a while, summer can get…boring. If there are kids in your house, you might be looking for something fun to do about now. Maybe even something educational. You don’t want to give your children a bunch of worksheets or anything, but it might be nice if they had something to get their brains going. Maybe you live somewhere (far away from here) where it’s been raining a lot and need some constructive indoor activity. Well, I have a plan for you!

I’ve decided to take a some science experiments I did with students and write them up for home use. I am choosing some activities that use common household substances and supplies. Also, these activities are easily adapted to a variety of ages. The key way to adapt the activities is to ask different questions. I’ll be giving the general setup of the activity, then a list of questions the kids can ponder. Many of the questions will be science questions, but some will branch into other subjects. The list will generally go from easy questions to hard questions. The activities will generally be adaptable for K-12 grades, although the parent’s role will be quite different. For a high school student, you could probably print off the post and hand it to the student, but you’d be doing a lot of work with a second-grader.

These activities typically guide kids through exploring a topic. I have done many of these activities with high school students, and the kids usually get pretty into them. Not all the questions have obvious, or even “correct,” answers, so go have fun with this!