Fun End of the Year Science Activities
It is the end of the school year and science teachers and science students are anticipating a well-deserved summer break. However, for science teachers there are still a few more lessons left to fill with informative and inspiring material and content. This can sometimes be a difficult task if you do not have the right kind of activities at hand and you want to avoid total apathy in the lab. With a little planning, you can turn those last few days into a relevant consolidation of the year's scientific syllabus.
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The Human Body
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Focus on the human body in an activity to see who is in the best shape. There is always something to be learned and demonstrated with the human body. During the last week of school initiate a scientific fitness regime to replicate the experience of being a professional athlete. Divide the class into groups and assign each a sport. Each group will be responsible for designing a scientific method to gauge the physical stress acted upon its assigned sport and make projections of the long-term effects of these sports on the body. For example, students will come up with a way to test the pressure on the knee joints of a basketball player over the course of a whole career. Active students may take roles as test subjects and endure the physical tests, while less active students can be responsible for taking the necessary measurements. At the end, collate all the results and see which sport impacts the body most.
A Scientific Review
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A class project which is fairly relaxed, fun and creative is the production of a journal. The focus of the journal should be all the scientific material covered that year, including experiments, developments in the scientific world and syllabus topics. However, the information can be distributed through the pages as crosswords, word searches, jokes, games, satirical reports and photos. This is a good way to include all the students in an activity, especially if you assign them a page each and give them ultimate freedom to express the core scientific subject matter in any way they wish. It is also something that can be printed many times and taken home with students so they each have a token of the scientific year gone by. There are many scientific journals out there in the world, and a large part of a successful scientist's job is the production of papers and reports.
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A Day at the Races
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A great part of learning in science is concerned with how things move, are propelled or vibrate, from atoms to zeppelins. While it is unlikely that you will be propelling single atoms with your class at the end of year, you can easily begin projects based around vehicle design, materials and aerodynamics. Hold racing competitions to find out why different designs work better than others. Vehicles must be built in class and can include cars and boats with an array of propulsion methods from elastic bands to steam, hot air balloons made from blocks and plastic bags, helicopters and all manner of radio-controlled vehicles.
Saving the World
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A thoughtful and potentially very useful project to carry with students at the end of the year is to assess the school's surrounding neighborhood for the amount of pollution in the area. This involves splitting the class into groups and venturing outside, which students enjoy because it is a break from sitting in the classroom. Students test streams and river banks to find out the levels of pollution in the water. They test soil acidity and any erosion of buildings to find if acid rain is having an impact in the area. They take samples of air in different areas to find out how polluted the air may be, and what that means for the atmosphere. If there are significant results, the local authorities could be informed or petitioned to do something about it.
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