Super Courses for Super Kids
A couple of weeks ago I held a webinar about creating your own apps. Afterward, one of the participants, Candy, emailed me to share a neat site that I hadn’t previously seen. That site is called Kidzcourse, Super Courses for Super Kids. Kidzcourse offers twelve courses featuring hands-on activities for kids from ages six through […]
Science Fun in the Sun – Free Science Lesson Plan
As I write this it’s a cloudy and relatively cold June day here in Maine. The sunshine will return and with it there will be some opportunities for fun outdoor learning activities. One such activity is building a solar oven and trying to cook something like s’mores in it. 4H offers free instructions on how […]
A Sweet Science Project
My daughters, like almost all children, love candy! So my daughters and I are going to attempt to make our own rock candy this weekend. They love doing little projects like this and I’m hoping that they’ll like this one as well. The inspiration for doing this came from watching a recent SciShow Kids episode […]
Phidgets – A Fun, Free, Hands-on Way to Learn Python, Java, and More
Disclosure: Phidgets is an advertiser on this blog. As the new school year approaches Phidgets is one new thing that I’m excited to use with my students. Phidgets provide a fun, hands-on way for students to learn to program in Python, Java, C#, and Swift. If you’re not a computer science teacher, don’t skip over […]
Three Hands-on Pi Day Lessons
Tomorrow is Pi Day. If you’re looking from some Pi Day activities to do with your students, take a look at the following three activities available on Exploratorium’s Science Snacks site. I have provided brief summaries of each activity below. Click the links for the activities to read the full directions and materials list for […]
Three Good Places to Find Hands-on STEM Activities
On a fairly regular basis I’m asked for recommendations for hands-on STEM activities. In fact, just this morning I answered an email from a reader who was seeking that recommendation. Here are three of my go-to recommendations for hands-on STEM activities. Microsoft has two excellent and free resources for those who are seeking ideas for […]
Vacation Project – Build the Coolest Machine Ever!
I know that the vast majority of you are on vacation right now. I also know that many of you have children who will be looking for fun things to do during vacation days. SciShow Kids has a couple of videos about hands-on science projects that kids can do at home. The first video is […]
4-H STEM Lab – A Good Place to Find Hands-on STEM Activities for K-12
The 4-H STEM Lab is a good place to find hands-on STEM activities for students of all ages. Activities in the 4-H STEM Lab are organized according to topic and grade level. The topics are alternative energy, chemistry, electricity, engineering, and physics. As is often the case with resources like this, some of the suggested activities […]
Hacking a “Hacking STEM” Project
In Sunday’s Practical Ed Tech Tip of the Week email I featured Microsoft’s Hacking STEM project library. The idea behind Hacking STEM is to make low-cost or no-cost hands-on STEM projects accessible to as many people as possible. You can follow Microsoft’s directions as written or modify the projects to use other materials to build […]
DIY Solar Updraft Tower – A Hands-on Elementary Science Lesson
SciShow Kids has a playlist of videos titled Super Simple Machines. The videos in that playlist feature explanations and demonstrations of simple machines that students could make in your classroom. One of those videos is Spin a Wheel With Sunlight. By watching Spin a Wheel With Sunlight students can learn how solar energy can be […]
This Looks Like a Great Hands-on PD Experience
FireWorks is an educational program, sponsored in part by the U.S. Forest Service, designed to teach students about the science of wildfires. This morning I received an email about a free two day professional development workshop centered around the FireWorks educational curriculum. The hands-on workshop is in Missoula, Montana this June. It appears to be […]
Fun, Hands-on Science Lessons
Science Snacks is a resource that I referenced in my list of ten blog post topics for your school blog. Science Snacks is a resource that provides ideas and directions for hands-on science lessons. Science Snacks features activities that can be conducted with inexpensive and readily available materials. Each Science Snack comes with a materials […]
Sundials and Snowflakes – How to Make Your Own
SciShow Kids recently published a new video that explains to students how a sundial works and how they can make their own sundials. The video could be the basis for a fun, hands-on lesson about learning to tell time. For those in cold, northern climates creating and taking sundials outside with your students might not […]
Workbench Offers Good Hands-on STEM Activities
Workbench is a service that offers a huge catalog of hands-on learning activities for students. Last month at the ISTE conference I got to see one of the activities in action. That was a project in which students create and program their own controllers for a Sphero ball. You can see the results of the […]
Fun DIY Projects To Complete With Your Kids
DIY.org is a neat website on which kids can find dozens of DIY projects that they can do on their own or with their parents. DIY.org provides videos and instructions on how to do the projects. After going through the directions kids then try to complete the project. When they’ve completed the project they can take […]
Wild Weather Kitchen Experiments
Wild Weather Kitchen Experiments is a short series of instructional videos produced by The Open University. Each of the four videos in the series features a short lesson followed by directions for an experiment that you can carry out to see the lesson’s concepts in action. The four lessons are on avalanches, tornadoes, floods, and […]