Blowing bubbles is an entertaining, hands-on activity for little ones, and it also provides scores of other science lessons. You can show them how to make bubbles out of dishwashing soap and a drop of glycerin. This way, you can teach students about measuring out and mixing ingredients. You can experiment different types of wands for different bubble sizes with your class. Add food coloring to your homemade or store bought bubble solution and have students blow bubbles onto paper. Talk with your students about how the movement of air, when you blow on the bubble, pushes it forward. Look for a "rainbow" in bubbles.
Help students explore the relationship between their sense of sight and smell. Set up a smelling station with small containers filled with different odorous elements, such as cinnamon, lemon, and chocolate, with the tops of the containers covered with fabric. Use a needle to poke tiny holes in the fabric. Number each container. Write down on your own personal sheet of paper the corresponding element for each number. Ask your students to smell the containers and have them write down what they think is inside. Go over the correct answers.
Children like to play with gooey, slimy things. As a science activity, have students make their own slime. Gather white glue, water, borax, craft sticks, sealable plastic bags, a large cup, and a bowl to mix ingredients together. Pour an equal amount of glue and water into the bowl, and mix. In the large cup, mix 1 cup of water with 1 tbsp. of borax. Cover the cup and shake it hard. Continue adding borax, 1 tbsp. at a time until the borax stops dissolving when stirred. Next, ask a student volunteer to add 2 tbsp. of the borax mixture to the mixture in the bowl and stir with a craft stick. A gooey slime will result. Each student can take a bag of slime home.
Have your middle school students make a compost pile they keep working on throughout Science Week. It can be a long-term project, but there is a lot to be learned observing the activity of a compost pile over one week. For faster composting, add red wiggler worms to hasten the process. Have students bring in any food waste from lunch or from home to add to the compost pile, such as apple cores and banana peels. Students can take turns mixing the compost. This teaches lifelong skills of caring for the earth, as well as the breakdown of decaying organic material.
Have your students extract DNA from spinach. This experiment is done by blending spinach in a blender until it has a smoothie-like consistency. Strain the resulting liquid into a bowl using a pasta strainer. Next, your students place a cup of water, mixed with a bit of soap into the bowl of spinach juice and have it sit for about five minutes. Place the same amount of rubbing alcohol as you have spinach liquid into your mixture. Let it sit another five minutes. Silver strands should begin to appear. These are DNA strands. Explain to students that blending the spinach broke it down and the rubbing alcohol caused the DNA strands to join together.
Do sports drinks give athletes more energy during physical activity than water does? High school students can check this theory with a science experiment. Ask a sports team on campus if they can participate. Have half the team drink a sports drink, such as Gatorade, but no water, before and during their next practice. Have the other half of the team do the same with water and no sports drink. Students record each player's name, whether she drank water or a sports drink, and her heart rate before practice begins. If possible, record each athlete's heart rate halfway through practice. Finally, have your students take the heart rates again at the end of practice. Your class will be required to do calculations to determine which group of athletes had a greater net heart rate increase. It can be concluded that the group with the smaller net heart rate increase had the most energy. Conclude whether the class's hypothesis was accurate and possible reasons for the conclusion.
Although having a class pet is more common in elementary and middle school classrooms than in high school, kids of all ages are interested in animals. For Science Week, have a class pet to observe the animal's behavior. There are multitudes of activities your class can conduct with a class pet, no matter what the pet is. The students can test for the animal's preferences of foods, light, temperature, or even color. They could try conditioning the animal through reward and punishment, to see if they can form desired behaviors in their pet. Hamsters, rabbits, mice, pigeons and other birds are good for the above types of experiments.