Creativity in Mind

I am including my students' favorite labs and activities for a physical science unit covering motion, forces and energy. The Newton's Scooter Lab is a fun and physical to review Newton's Laws of Motion using a skateboard or scooter and the students' own mass. I used my Roller Coaster Lab to review forces and energy and students had a blast designing various coaster 'prototypes.' The Friction lab, while straightforward is a hands-on approach to this concept. Finally, I am including my Energy Tran

I used these throughout my electricity unit for initial exposure to the content, but they can be used for review or homework or, if you need to be out for the day as well. Enjoy!

Add a little fun and creativity to your Chemistry/Elements/Periodic Table units! Students find this project highly engaging because they have ownership of the word they choose for their bookmark. It's a great way to review concepts related to the Periodic Table. Project description, recording sheets, analysis questions and rubric are all contained in one packet To make the bookmarks, I cut out 5 cm by 18 cm rectangles from a standard sheet of posterboard. You will get about 40 bookmarks per shee

I am creating vocabulary and readings to go with all of my major units this year to support reading comprehension skills. Our final assessments have become reading-focused, so the more practice the better! Use these to introduce the unit, as homework or as test review. I felt that these two readings went well together, so that is why I am bundling them together for savings. Enjoy! :)

Do you need a break from the madness that are the weeks of Halloween or Christmas?!? I created this because I just wanted to enjoy a well-earned movie, but not feel guilty that they weren't learning science in the process. I included mostly science process skills (Graphing and The Scientific Method) as well as Physical Science concepts. That is what we are learning about this year. However, you could change a few questions to tailor it to your needs. Or leave as is and who cares? All science is

This is really two labs in one. In the first part, students hypothesize which of three liquids will float on top of each other. I purposely give all the groups different amounts of each of the liquids (to set up part two). They get practice with both the scientific method and with graphing. In the second part, we curate each others' data into three data tables in order to make a triple line graph (with key) to view what mass and volume data look like when graphed. More advanced students can cal

I've done this activity from 7th through 12th grades and it's always entertaining to see what they come up with. Since they're not actually building it, they can really think out of the box (ex- nuclear energy and thermal energy become popular). I usually do this after a lesson on energy and then I will show then the OK Go, "This Too Shall Pass" video as that is the ultimate contraption to model (in my opinion). You may also wish to show them Rube Goldberg examples. Or, modify a bit and simply u

Here is a fun little lab to review the concepts of Graphing and The Scientific Method. Students will also practice taking averages of data. You probably have the supplies in a well-stocked storage room- droppers, cups, water and pennies. Enjoy!

I plan to use this before the holiday break. I made another movie guide for The Nightmare Before Christmas and the students liked it a great deal. This one is shorter because it is a shorter animated feature, but it is good for one period and the cartoon is funny and festive. Enjoy!

I have started doing weekly readings with vocabulary because our assessments have changed to ones in which decoding from informational text is an imperative skill. This is my reading and vocabulary for The Scientific Method. There are a great deal of vocabulary terms for this unit. Why not add a little extra reinforcement for this tricky topic? Enjoy! :)