Ray Byle

This is a hands-on activity in which students work in small groups and create series and parallel circuits. The worksheet guides them as they work through increasingly more complex circuits. You will have to drag them away from the equipment because they like it so much. Lots of experimenting going on outside of the directions. Equipment needed includes small gauge wire, light bulbs, batteries, solar cells and DC motors. These can be purchased from school supply companies like Kelvin, and u

This is a nice activity to illustrate some basic principles of energy. Students collect data from bouncing golf and ping pong balls on a hard floor. Students use data to make observations about the energy used and transferred, how factors like mass and height effect energy, and if you can get more energy out of a system than was put in it. There is an additional homework assignment at the end in which students create and do their own experiment.

This is a project based unit for teaching students how to design, conduct and present conclusions for an experiment. It can be easily adapted for grades 5-10. Included is a 15 page booklet that can be copied and handed out to students to work through over the week. There is a teacher page with lesson plan outlines and guidelines. This can be used as a STEM project and/or an assessment for a unit.

This is a short 20-30 minute activity that gets students out of their seats and moving around the room. Students must first estimate metric measurements of various things around the room, then get up and measure them. They must be able to use a meter stick with the meter, centimeter, and millimeter units as well as a scale and graduated cylinder for mass and volume. This works well if students work in pairs.