Free science lesson plans designed to engage students through hands-on experiments and activities. Chemistry, life sciences, physics, engineering and more, for elementary, middle and high school teachers.
Can your students lift a book off the floor with just one finger? Find out and learn about simple machines in this fun lesson plan about levers.
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
3-5-ETS1-3. Plan and carry out fair tests in which variables are controlled and failure points are considered to identify aspects of a model or prototype that can be improved.
Have your students read about autonomous (also called self-driving or driverless) cars in the news? How can you build a car or a robot that will stay on the road without a human driver? In this project, your students will find out by building a robot that can automatically follow a line around a homemade race course, while learning about the electromagnetic spectrum and electronic circuits.
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
MS-PS4-2. Develop and use a model to describe that waves are reflected, absorbed, or transmitted through various materials.
How was magnetism responsible for the destruction of dozens of ships during World War II? In this lesson, your students will
explore the concepts of magnetic fields and forces using the example of World War II magnetic mines. With the help of a magnetometer and
Google's Science Journal app, students will investigate what factors affect the strength of a magnetic field. Then they will use
their knowledge to try to discover the location of hidden "mines" and investigate how they can cloak a…
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
MS-PS2-3.
Ask questions about data to determine the factors that affect the strength of electric and magnetic forces.
MS-PS2-5.
Conduct an investigation and evaluate the experimental design to provide evidence that fields exist between objects exerting
forces on each other even though the objects are not in contact.
What do a crazy hair day, a wooden door stuck in its frame, and the weather have in common? Humidity! In this fun hands-on weather lesson students explore surprising information about human hair, the air around them, and the weather by building a hygrometer from a strand of hair, a straw, a wooden panel, and two nails. A great way to make humidity visible!
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
3-ESS2-1.
Represent data in tables and graphical displays to describe typical weather conditions expected during a particular season.
3-ESS2-2.
Obtain and combine information to describe climates in different regions of the world.
Rainstorms can be powerful! Can you guess how much water poured down during the last rainstorm you experienced? Do you know if a brief downpour yields more or less water compared to a daylong drizzle? In this hands-on weather lesson, students design, build and use their own rain gauge to get answers to all of these questions.
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
3-ESS2-1.
Represent data in tables and graphical displays to describe typical weather conditions expected during a particular season.
3-ESS2-2.
Obtain and combine information to describe climates in different regions of the world.
Students experience the weather every day: they feel cold spring mornings and warm summer afternoons. This hands-on lesson helps them quantify how hot or cold it is by using a thermometer they will make themselves! Based on their gathered data and observations, students can infer patterns about how temperature varies by location and time.
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
3-ESS2-1.
Represent data in tables and graphical displays to describe typical weather conditions expected during a particular season.
3-ESS2-2.
Obtain and combine information to describe climates in different regions of the world.
Help the budding meteorologists in your classroom learn how to measure wind speed by building their own anemometers (wind speed meters) with paper cups and straws. Then do a simple experiment in which students change the "wind" speed using a fan and measure how fast their anemometer spins.
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
3-ESS2-1. Represent data in tables and graphical displays to describe typical weather conditions expected during a particular season.
In this fun, hands-on lesson, students explore their heartbeats and learn about blood circulation. They will make their own stethoscopes, use them to measure their heart rates and investigate how heart rate is affected by exercise.
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
4-LS1-1.
Construct an argument that plants and animals have internal and external structures that function to support survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction.
Can genetic or environmental factors affect our chances of getting a certain disease? In this activity, your students will model how an existing predisposition can impact the probability of developing an autoimmune disease using dice and M&M's® candy!
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
HS-LS3-3. Apply concepts of statistics and probability to explain the variation and distribution of expressed traits in a population.
Why is it important to eat healthy and exercise? In this hands-on lesson plan, students will build a simple model to explore the effects of plaque buildup in arteries. The model allows them to demonstrate what happens to blood flow when heart disease narrows a person's arteries.
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NGSS Performance Expectations:
4-LS1-1. Construct an argument that plants and animals have internal and external structures that function to support survival, growth, behavior, and reproduction.
