If you’re like me, you want to have engaging activities during the first days and weeks of your science class that will set the stage for a great year. In this blog post, I’ve rounded up a handful of my favorite activities that will grab your middle school scientists by their brains from day one! All of these activities are appropriate for middle school students regardless of the specific type of science that you teach because they get kids practicing important, relevant skills!
#1: Science Interest Survey and Decorate a Virtual Locker
I have two easy, no-prep activities that will each fill 15 or so minutes of time on one of the first days of school!
I created a Getting to Know You Google Form and added a Science Interest section to the bottom of it. Click on this link to grab a copy of the Getting to Know You Questionnaire/Science Interest Survey Google Form. You can edit it as you see fit!
Once your students have responded, you can see trends in your students’ answers to how they learn and what types of science they like best! You can also export their responses into a spreadsheet. It takes a little bit of time, but what I like to do is export the data to a spreadsheet, print it out, tape the pages together to make a big reference sheet of all of my students’ answers. Then, I sometimes use colored highlighters to highlight important things that I want to remember about certain students and I make notes next to students’ names as I learn more about them! I always peak at this reference sheet before parent conferences and when I need to tap into the world of one of my students.
The second activity is a Decorate Your Own Virtual Locker Google Slides! Students can add stickers, pictures, text, and more to their own virtual locker. Then, if you share the Class Gallery Google Slides with them, they can insert an image of their decorated lockers into the Gallery so that all of the students can see one another’s work! It’s like having a virtual hall of lockers representing your awesome students! CLICK HERE to grab this Decorate Your Virtual Locker freebie!
#2: Science Gab Lab Stations
The first days of school usually follow a bit of a wacky schedule and your students may not have 1:1 devices just yet. This can make it tricky to plan for a digital activity. That’s why I like to get my students engaged in science right away AND encourage them to chat with their new classmates. A warm classroom where everyone feels welcome is the first step to a well-managed science classroom. I call this activity the Gab Lab.
Your students will appreciate the chance to talk about themselves and complete small coloring tasks along with engaging with interesting science content! This is also a nice early-assessment tool for you to assess your students’ collaboration, writing, and higher-level thinking skills! It takes about 2 to 2.5 class periods for the students to complete all 8 stations!
There are 8 stations set up around the room. Each station includes both a science task and a social task. Each station has a sign containing the directions for the Science Task that the students complete first at each station and a set of colored pencils that contains the colors red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, and brown.
The students will each have their own lab packet, which contains 8 sheets that can be copied back-to-back, plus the ‘science montage’ graphic on which they will color based on the Social Task directions at each station (this can be used as classroom décor or as a cover page for a science notebook!).
#3: Brown Bag Biography Activity
I’ve learned that the MOST important thing to do during the first weeks of school is to get to know my students! Knowing little things about my kiddos like the sports and instruments they play, their favorite place to visit, and their individual talents is gold for building authentic connections with them. The Getting to Know You Questionnaire and Science Interest Survey (above) is a great tool for learning about my students… but this Brown Bag Biography activity goes beyond the “What’s your favorite color?” questions and digs deeper!
Students choose three words that their family and friends would use to describe them, and they choose four items that represent something about them. In the classic version of this activity, students would go home and search around to find four items at their house to represent their interests, hobbies, achievements, memories, favorite things, etc. For this digital version, they can find pictures of things of ANY size to include in their brown bag! After choosing their words and items, students create an avatar of themselves to place in the frame. Then, they download their Brown Bag Biography slide and insert it into the Class Gallery where they explain why they chose each of the items. Here, they can receive and give feedback to make connections with their peers and with you!
#4: Emailing a Teacher Mini-Lesson
This mini-lesson on emailing a teacher is a great one to kick-off the school year because it has two important objectives: students learn to craft an appropriate email to a teacher, and you get to know a bit about your students! I actually created this lesson for when I returned from my maternity leave halfway through the school year. I wanted an assignment for my first day back that would be both structured and help me to get to know my new students. However, the impact of this lesson was so great that I decided to use it as a first-week of school activity!
For this lesson, I made a presentation of examples of well-written and poorly-written emails that I have ACTUALLY received from students! Students assess what is good and bad about each email. Then, they are given an outline of tips for writing an email to a teacher. This lesson format seems to really stick in their brains!
As an assessment after the lesson, my students have to email me using the tips that they learned. They have to answer some required questions and some ‘pick and chose’ questions. I absolutely LOVE reading my students’ well-formatted and thoughtful emails! As a science teacher, I sometimes feel like I don’t always get to peak inside my students’ heads the way a language arts teacher does. So I am so pleased when my students share with me how they are feeling about the school year starting, where they went on their summer vacations, and their goals for the school year.
And to be honest, I even reviewed this lesson and had my students write me another properly-formatted email after winter break last year! My middle schoolers can never have too much practice drafting well-written emails! Click here to grab this FREE Emailing a Teacher Mini-Lesson!
#5: Scientific Theories versus Laws Group Activity
This Scientific Theories and Laws Group Activity is a fun activity to get students working together on the first days of school! I preface this activity by asking the class what they know about scientific theories and scientific laws. Then, I informally poll the class with the question: can a scientific theory become a scientific law? Most students say yes with the explanation that if a theory is proved enough times, it can become a law (This is not true! But don’t tell them that yet!)
In the first activity of this lesson, a short “story” is written as one word per card. The cards are cut apart and mixed up and students do not know what any of them say. In groups of 3, they follow the directions to flip over certain numbers of cards and write theories about what the story is about. They eventually share with other groups and discuss whether and why their theories were different from one another. They draw pictures of their final theory (great classroom decor!).
For the second part of this activity, each student group will need a tennis ball. A repetitive test with repeatable, consistent results illustrates the concept of scientific law. These two activities together are an excellent lesson to differentiate between scientific theory and scientific law and students will refer back to this lesson all year!
#6: Science Career Research and T-Shirt (Real or Printable!) Design 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. You can use real t-shirts, used t-shirts turned inside-out, or use the printable t-shirts included with this resource!
This project really gets the students excited to learn about their chosen career and to try to make their T-shirt unique and beautiful! It’s a great project to kick off the school year because it focuses students on a REAL, relevant science career, and they learn about lots of other careers too.
#7: Bag-O-Chemistry Making Observations Activity
I call this activity the Bag-O-Chemistry! This reaction in a sandwich bag activity provides an exciting and colorful chemical reaction that students can hold in their hands! It’s a great activity for the first couple of weeks of science class as it requires easy prep, any easy procedure to follow, and a fun and interesting phenomena for students to practice making good observations and asking questions about empirical evidence. The reaction changes color, fizzes and bubbles, smells strong, feels both warm and cold, and the bag inflates with air!
Each student will need goggles. Each group of 3 students will need: a small (50 mL) beaker with solid calcium chloride pellets (I use the kind made for putting in pools at Home Depot), a small (50 mL) beaker with baking soda, 2 teaspoons, Phenol red solution (0.02%) (available on Amazon or at science supply stores like Flinn Scientific), and a Ziploc sandwich bag.
#8: ‘Lego Lab’ Procedure Writing Activity
This ‘Lego Lab’ Procedure Writing Activity is a fun activity to get students thinking about and practicing the characteristics of a well-written scientific procedure. The materials needed for this activity are plastic building blocks and brown paper bags! There is a little bit of prep for you to sort the blocks into pile sets that contain identical blocks.
Here is the gist of the activity– groups of 3 students build a structure and write a corresponding procedure that another group must try to follow. The better the procedure, the closer the groups will get to correctly building each others’ structures!
The groups evaluate one another on the strength of their procedures, and following a class discussion about the characteristics of a well-written procedure, the groups revise their own for building their structure. This activity is collaborative, low-stakes, and memorable — a great one for the first days and weeks of the school year!
#9: Rainbow Rack Designer Color Challenge
This Rainbow Rack Designer Color Challenge is a fun group lab activity that helps students to practice their measuring skills, lab skills, data collection skills, and math skills! Students will use primary colors and custom secondary colors to create their own designer colors. The groups will have to measure carefully and keep track of their color ‘recipes’.
You can host a Designer Color Fashion Show and have the class vote on their favorite colors! I love taking photos of my students doing this activity with their lab goggles on to show on my Back-to-School-Night slideshow!
For this activity, each group of 3 students will need a tray containing: a test tube rack with 10 test tubes, 3 flasks with water RICHLY colored red, yellow, and blue, 6 pipettes, 6 graduated cylinders (3 x 10 mL and 3 x 25 mL), access to a sink or large beaker of plain water, and a large beaker for ‘contaminated’ wastewater. This is an inquiry activity that gives you a sense of your students’ strengths and weaknesses while giving students a chance to have fun experimenting!
#10: Mystery Solutions Partner Puzzle
This Mystery Solutions Puzzle is a GREAT way to grab my students by their brains! The point of this activity is that pairs of students imagine that they are working in laboratories 500 miles apart from one another and they have a puzzle to solve. They each have a set of three clear solutions — but one student’s set is labeled A-B-C and the other student’s set is labeled 1-2-3.
They must figure out which lettered solution is the same as which numbered solution, but the pairs cannot see each other, they cannot talk, and they can only communicate by writing!
This activity is challenging, but what I love about it is that sometimes my lower students solve the puzzle before the more advanced students! I love that there is NO TALKING during this activity and I’m able to really observe my students’ higher-level thinking skills. They love the excitement of successfully figuring out this puzzle ‘500 miles apart’ from their partner!
The prep for this activity takes about 40 minutes and the materials are fairly easy to get. You can read more about facilitating this activity in this blog post and grab the freebie digital lab there, too!
#11: Light-Up Name Plates
For this activity, give your students a simple template to help guide them to create their own personalized light-up name plate during the first days of school!
This activity is awesome for a few reasons. You will notice right away the students who possess strong resilience, those who struggle with directions, those who seem to love a challenge, and those who give up quickly! Your students will be learning about circuits straight out of the gates — even if this isn’t in your curriculum! You can CLICK HERE to download this Light-Up Name Plate Challenge for FREE!
I hope that these ideas help you plan for the first days and weeks of your science class! Please leave your ideas in the comments section below!
1 Comment
Andrea
August 29, 2021 at 9:46 pmHello, Karla. I liked how you made getting to know your students your priority in the classroom for the first week and trickled in some science too. Many of the activities you have required group work and collaboration, and if this were a “normal” school year, I would be all about it. Do you have any ideas on how to modify some of these lessons to adhere to social distancing guidelines? Thank you, Andrea.