My kids love science lessons. I recently bought some magnifying glasses, and we are having great fun using them and drawing what we see in our journals. Since as of right now my kiddos are 5,6,7,7 I am doing a lot of lesson planning for the summer to keep them busy as they get bored with to much free play, although we do have at least three hours of it a day if not more. I am having trouble comeing up with science lessons! We will be doing food coloring in water, using eye droppers and seeing how it changes colors, a butterfly farm, a lady bug farm, I need more stuff and I know you all have the good stuff!

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Check out science bob. My kids loved that site through school.

I should add that they are STEM majors, now.

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Add celery and flowers to the color experiments.

Do some mini trebuchet or catapults. Icicle sticks and craft sticks.

Let them garden. Like. From plan to harvest.

Let them build. A stage maybe. And string some lights for a parent concert.

And by stage I mean a couple pallets and some goodwill blankets for curtains. Hand a string of lights and some lawn chairs. Serve popcorn and let them decide what to perform.

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Volcano with baking soda and vinegar
Get white daisies and put them in different color food coloring to dye them (lots of different flowers react to this).
Make crystals (with epsom salts I believe)

At that age I would be doing some long term projects like a space project or a project on forest fires etc. A long term project takes a specific subject and covers it in depth for a couple of weeks. With space I did a long term project about planets. We learned about each individual planet and then the last week we made our solar system with papier mache. The kids loved it!

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There's a book called Candy Experiments- you could probably find it at the library.
My daughter loves doing the experiments in this book (she's 8). Plus, it's great that she's saves any candy she gets for these experiments instead of eating it.

We just did a few color experiments last month:
1. White carnations in food coloring/water.
2. Dissolving colored marshmallows in warm water
3. Making homemade rock candy
4. Homemade geoddes

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Thanks for all the ideas, keep them coming. We have started a garden and are doing a weather chart each day. We check the thermometer, rain gauges, skies etc and chart it on a big chart on the wall. The garden we will be doing cooking lessons with some of the stuff so that is something!

I had thought of the homemade rock candy. How long does it take to become rock candy?

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Our praying mantis egg sacks (2 sacks of about 100 eggs each) and 1500 live ladybugs arrived in today's mail. After snacks we're going to put them in the trees on both sides of the property so they can hatch. Just have to bury them deep in the branches so birds don't eat them before they hatch. The ladybugs we'll check out and I'll let them out later (instructions say to let them out at dusk). Found them on amazon.

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My father in law is a biology teacher and he said one of the most liked lesson plans is on decomposition. Bugs, plantation, foods, ect. are fun to watch decompose and note how the different effects of air, light, no oxygen, plastic containers versus glass, ect can speed up or change the decomp. You can add factors like water or soil or whatever you want to change it up. The always fun expirement of seeing how a mcdonalds french fry decomposes is a great way t teach healthy nutrition. You can add acids to replicate our stomach and see how different types of food respond. A compost bin and a garden to use it on is another way to incorporate the lesson.

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This is where I got the idea and tips:
http://www.growingajeweledrose.com/2...xperiment.html

We left the sticks for over a week and they turned out great.

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I think the performance is a good end of summer idea if the parents would come. It would give them all summer to work on it.

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I remember doing that a looonnnggg time ago. I'm going to save this for my fun activities list. Thanks

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Have you seen the book "The Curious Kids Science Book?" It's a good one, because rather than spelling everything out (do this, then do this, then this happens)--which is less science experiment and more following directions--it presents an idea and the child tests it out in their own way. And it has lots of photographs, so a kid can easily browse it to find something they want to try.

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Cook and bake.

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Yes we are doing cooking lessons. Some of them using stuff from the garden we are growing, some stuff from a local farmer, and I am sure stuff from the store also!

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