As the school year draws to a close, it’s time to wrap up your science curriculum with a BANG! You middle school science students have put in a lot of hard work and learned so much, so let’s celebrate! And you!? You must be feeling the excitement and energy towards another school year being completed so very soon.
Now, how do you wrap up your school year? In my experience, the best way to end the school year in science class is to do projects!
Here are some engaging science projects to end the school year in your middle school science class:
Consumer Product Testing Project
This is a student-centered experimental design project for which students will determine the most superior brand out of 3 to 4 brands of a product of their choice (for example: Bounty, Scott, Brawny, and store-brand paper towels). To determine superiority, students will design three experiments that each test a different parameter of the products. This project is SO much fun for students and lets them use the inquiry and measuring skills they’ve gleaned through the school year. Check out this blog post to learn more!
Science Careers T-Shirt Project
Host a Science Career Fashion Show! Students research and science career (huge lists of careers are included!) and design a t-shirt to showcase their chosen career. This project really gets the students excited to learn about their chosen career and to try to make their T-shirt unique and beautiful!
Plastic in the Oceans Mini-Unit
If you need to cover the Human Impact NGSS Standard MS-ESS3-3, this week and a half-long Plastic in the Oceans Mini-Unit teaches students about the ubiquitous, terrible reality of plastic in Earth’s oceans. As a culminating project, students create a Public Service Announcement project to share and educate others about this pollution. You can read more about this topic in this blog post!
Graphing Great Whites Project
Have your students use the website Ocearch to track REAL Great White Sharks and use data about their weights, lengths, swim distances, and ages to create beautiful bar, line, pie, and X-Y graphs! My students LOVE doing this project every year because they get really excited to follow their chosen sharks! Check out this blog post to read more about this project!
Mousetrap Car Project
Your students will have a blast designing and building mousetrap cars! This is such a fun way to end the year in physical science because students will be using hands on skills to learn about energy, simple machines, and speed! You can see the materials list and read more about this project on this blog post!
Design Your Own Periodic Table Project
Let your students express themselves with this Design Your Own Periodic Table project! The possible themes for this project are practically limitless because kids come up with the most interesting topics to categorize into element families!
Newton’s Laws of Motion Video Project
Even if you already covered Newton’s Laws this year, this Newton’s Laws of Motion video demonstration project is still a great one to give your students a chance to show their understanding with an open-ended, creative task. They will make a video to demonstrate each of Newton’s three laws of motion in their every day lives. I’ve included some example videos that you can show your students for inspiration!
Science Passion Project
A Science Passion Project is a project that your students will drive! Let them investigate and come up with a topic that interests them, but also has to do with science! It’s a great way to keep students engaged during testing weeks or at the very end of the school year. I post this document on Google Classroom to provide my students with lots of ideas! I’ve had students choose to learn all about tropical cyclones, the mysteries of space,
and tsunami. I’ve had students create video demonstrations of elephant toothpaste and oobleck! Students’ Passion Projects can take many forms including creating a presentation, a podcast episode, a video documentary, or a book! Let them follow their curiosities and have fun!
End of the Year Science Awards
This isn’t a project for your students… but it’s (an easy) one for you! I created this set of 65 science-themed end of the year awards that highlight the incredible ways science can reflect the traits we value most: creativity, kindness, persistence, and curiosity. It’s so much fun to give students awards at the end of the school year. It’s a really warm and fuzzy way to close the year as you can give attention to everyone’s strengths!
This resource includes 65 ready-to-use award certificates in auto-fill PDF and Google Slides formats!
Pro Tips:
- Consider pairing the awards with a certificate ceremony and/or a science-themed celebration.
- You could optionally use the Google Slides version as a presentation!
- Let students guess or vote on who will get which award before the reveal—it adds excitement!
- Use the awards as conversation starters about the science concepts behind them.
