Category: Science

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Living-Non Living Montessori Cards

Today I have some free Montessori-style Living and Non-Living Sort Cards for you!  🙂  Use these cards to sort into living and non-living groups. Behind the scenes I’ve been getting things ready for our upcoming science units. ED will be doing a bit of animal classification review and I made some new cards for her. I realized, though, that if any of my readers have younger kids in the 2-4...

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Preschool Science at Home

Five or six weeks ago, someone asked me how I go about setting up our science units. I wanted to spend some time really laying out that process. Since we have homeschooled from the start, I thought it would make the most sense to talk about the preschool years first. (Click here to see the second post in the series: Science in the Elementary Years. Science in the preschool years:...

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Our Favorite Simple Machines Activities– Pulleys (and Wheel and Axle)

The last day of our Simple Machines unit was probably our favorite. We spent hours and hours making and toying with different ways of making pulleys and wheel-n-axles! We started (as always) by reading a couple of books.  We did an activity to show investigate which way of looping the rope made it easier/harder to pull the broom-handles together: The kids really enjoyed Pull, Lift, and Lower: A Book About...

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Simple Machines Unit: Screw Hands-On Activities

We started with… a plain old screw!! The kids spent time trying to screw it into an old board:   We have been reading the book, Archimedes and the Door of Science along with this unit. What a terrific book and what a remarkable man Archimedes was!  The book talks about the Archimedes screw as well as lots of other topics — astronomy, math, geometry and more. We loved the...

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Simple Machines Unit: Wedge Hands-On Activities

The wedge is a pretty easy concept to remember, but we still took the opportunity to have some fun with wedges! We spent some time outside at the wood pile using real wedges to split wood (plus, we got some wood ready for the woodstove!!) This is a tool call a “Smart Splitter.” Even the kids can split wood with it. They simply lifted the weight and dropped it down...

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Simple Machines Packet (About 30 pages)

I have kids of different ages (5, 8 and 10). We all did this simple machines unit together. It was perfect for my younger two — quite easy for my oldest, but from here we’re going to go on to more complicated topics… inventions and electricity (see our STEM Electricity and Circuits Packet here) which are more suited to my older two.  It works best for our family to do...

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Simple Machines Unit: Hands-On Activities on Levers

We started a unit on Simple Machines several weeks ago.  I thought I’d share the first set of hands on activities we did on levers and the three classes of levers. We started our unit going over the six types of simple machines. Since I have kids of varying levels I made several sheets (matching, tracing and fill in the blanks). In the end, this turned out to be useful...

What to Do with That Candy? Science Experiments, Donations… 0

What to Do with That Candy? Science Experiments, Donations…

If you are wondering what to do with all that Halloween candy, you can always do some science! This is an experiment I did with my kids a while back with Skittles in water. I think the results are fascinating: Do you want to do other fun experiments with candy? Be sure to visit this great website, Candy Experiments written by Loralee, a mom of three. She recently wrote a post Candy Experiment Cards...

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Human Body Activities – Digestive System

We had an amazing time studying the Digestive System.  We did a whole range of hands-on activities from making our own epiglottis  to seeing how the digestive tract works (how nutrients pass through). We made “fake”vomit, measured out the length of the digestive system and more! I also made notebook for the kids as we went through this unit. Our Digestive System Packet is now 150+ pages. Our Digestive System...

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Various Free Montessori 3-Part Cards

This post includes links to some of the Montessori 3-part cards I’ve made over the years. Most of them are free! Montessori Sorting Activity: Living Nonliving Cards  Montessori-Style Animal Cards: Sorting Vertebrates-Invertebrates and Animals of the 5 Kingdoms U.S. Landmarks and Symbols – 3 part cards FREE — We placed these cards on a huge US map we have as we learned where these famous landmarks are locate. Montessori 3-Part...

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Hands On Activities — Earthquakes, Plate Movements, Mountain Making, Volcanoes and other Earth Science Topics

Are you looking for hands-on Earth Science activities? This is a collection of some our favorite activities from our unit. Layers of the Earth Activities:   I first saw this activity last year at The Learning Ark. It fit in perfectly with our Earth Science unit. There is also a similar activity using a hard-boiled egg in the book we are using for this unit, How the Earth Works by Michelle O’Brien-Palmer.  One of...

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Free Rocks and Minerals Packet

Are you studying Rocks and Minerals?! Be sure to check out this post again which covers  how rocks have been used,  famous rock landmarks,  how we use minerals in our environment, mining, recycling and the months and birthstones. Be sure to check out the links to our hands-on activities about the three types of rocks: sedimentary, igneous and metamorphic which you’ll find below. This week, I’m out of commission. I’m...

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Free Units on Pets and Pet Diseases (called Zoonoses!)

I learned a new word with this unit: A zoonosis is any disease or infection that is naturally transmissible from vertebrate animals to humans.   Zoonoses would be the plural! We had such a good experience with the CDC Science Ambassador unit on the West Nile Virus that we decided to try one more unit: Healthy Pets, Healthy People (Note: Look on the second set of tabs for “Zoonotic Disease”). Besides...

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Kindergarten Science – Classifying Animals

Last week, ED spent some time learning about the different animal groups — mammals, birds, fish, reptiles and amphibians. We talked about some of the different characteristics of each group and she spent time separating them into the different categories. We have a number of different activities and she spent several days going through our various activities: One was from a book called Take It to Your Seat Science Centers and...