Investigate life sciences using household items through easy science projects. Looking at biology from home, you could study the ecosystems hosted by your back yard or a local green area using a magnifying glass or digital camera, for example. Other areas of biology you could investigate are the uses of trees, such as in the making of paper towels.
As an example science project, you could test the strength of different brands of paper towel. Purchase a pair of economy and a pair of luxury brand paper towel reels. Test each paper towel's strength by placing it on a circular embroidery frame and taping around the edge. Add a quarter in the exact center of the paper towel and keep adding a quarter at a time until the towel rips and the coins crash down --- note the number of coins required for each towel to rip. Compare the strength of the different branded paper towels, thinking about whether luxury paper towel brands are worth the additional cost.
Basic chemistry projects can use a number of household products. You could complete a consumer project to compare the performance of different dish wash detergents, for example, or explore a simple acid/base reaction by mixing vinegar and bicarbonate of soda to produce carbon dioxide.
One easy example experiment you can conduct gets you to investigate the chemistry behind a lava lamp. Find a used plastic bottle with a lid, rinse it clean with water before nearly filling it with a mix of 3/4 vegetable oil and 1/4 tap water. Add roughly 10 drops of food coloring to make your lava lamp colorful and vibrant before breaking apart an Alka-Seltzer tablet into approximately six pieces. Add the pieces to the bottle one-by-one and observe the lava lamp effect created. Carry out background reading into acid/base reactions and why oil and water don't mix to help you understand the lava lamp effect within the bottle.
Whether it's recreating Galileo's experiment using a tennis ball, an orange and an apple or exploring Newton's Third Law of Motion using a toy car and a balloon to propel it, there are numerous ways of experimenting with physics using everyday items.
You can investigate the qualities of surface tension using a magnifying glass. Line up three drinking glasses inside a sink and fill each one to the brim with water, milk and oil. Use a magnifying glass to observe the qualities of surface tension in each liquid, which seems to curve upwards above the rim of the glass. Add a quarter to each of your liquids and observe the results by magnifying once again. Hypothesize as to which liquid will spill first if you continue adding quarters to each glass. Carry on adding quarters to each glass until you have caused all three to spill, periodically observing with the magnifying glass to see how surface tension causes the liquid to bulge upwards.
Earth science involves looking at the weather, environment, atmospheric conditions and geology, so completing a project using household items is easy. You could look at weather patterns 100 miles away from your home town, for example, and see if you can use them to predict the weather in your local area over the coming days. Or you could dig into your garden and measure the temperature of soil at different depths on different days to see if air temperature affects soil temperature.
One simple earth science project focuses on the conditions required to create fog. Place two identical empty plastic bottles next to each other and 1/2 fill one with hot and the other with cold tap water. Wedge an ice cube into the neck of each bottle so it is suspended above the water. Observe as fog forms inside your hot water condition bottle only. The fog that forms is known as radiation fog and it occurs because warm wet air rises from the hot water and meets cold, dry air from the ice cube causing the warm air to condense.