Lower Elementary (LE; 5-7 years old)

Soil Properties: Testing different kinds of soil to measure and compare their different absorption, air and pH properties.

Plant Dyes and Imprints: Learning about natural dyes found in plants and investigating how different kinds of fabrics absorb homemade natural dyes. 

The Water and Rock Cycles: Learning about the water cycle by creating a simple visual aid to individually observe the process of the water cycle. Students will also engage in an active exploration of the transformation that creates the 3 different types of rocks found on Earth and creating a model of each type of rock

Parent and Offspring: Learning and classifying the function of animal parts, and matching offspring to their parents based on inherited traits.  

Surviving in my Home: Learning and categorizing the properties and adaptations of living and nonliving things within different types of habitats. 

Biome Competition: Active description of the 7 main biomes found on Earth before matching and categorizing animal cards to their corresponding biomes.   

Light Energy: Exploration of the different wavelengths that natural light is made up of, and investigating how light can travel through some types of materials but not through others. Students will also create their own bath-bombs to learn about objects with fluorescent characteristics

Electrical Energy:  Learning about closed and open electrical circuits using batteries and conductive clay to light up an LED light.

My Neurons: Learning the function of different brain cells and how they actively communicate with each other through the modeling of a neuron and its parts

My Senses: Explore the gustatory and tactile senses through five different activities that will highlight the use of one sense at a time

Photosynthesis in Action: The use of plants and volume measurement tools to estimate a leaf’s active production of oxygen through the promotion or prevention of photosynthesis.

Glucose Content: Designing and building a food oven that will be utilized to produce food chemical reactions; and the active comparison of different kinds of sugars (e.g., glucose and sucrose) in food.  

Blocking UV: Controlled comparison of how effective different brands of sunblock with the same blocking concentration are at blocking UV rays using UV-sensitive color changing beads.  

Chlorophyll: Utilization of a chromatographic methods to visualize, measure, and compare the pigments in different kinds of leaves.  

Plant Food: Measuring the production of starch in plants that have been exposed to different amount of sunlight to make connections between the starch concentration and photosynthesis.  

Bacterial Growth: Performing a gram stain on grown bacterial cultures to measure and label gram-positive versus gram-negative bacteria. 

Newton’s Second Law of Motion: Designing and building a functional car with recycled materials and comparing the forces required to achieve a change in motion. 

Newton’s Inertia Ring: Using inertia and gravity to achieve a tricky task that compares different approaches.

Cellular Proteins: Compare the function and structure of white and red blood cells, and create miniature models of plant and animal cells. 

Microfeatures: Application and mastery of a light microscope to compare the fine structural differences of salt solution samples prepared on glass slides.