In my four short (yet simultaneously incredibly long…lol) years of teaching, I’ve taught 5th grade, 3rd grade, and now 1st! Unfortunately (in my experience at least…) it seems as though science is one of those subjects that can be the first to fall to the wayside. Because of this, I challenge myself to engage my students through a variety of science activities and hands-on experiments throughout the year. My students have always enjoyed science and truly look forward to it each and every day.
Make Science Engaging with Ward’s Science Kits!
One way to help make your science lessons engaging and hands on is with the help of Ward’s Science Kits. Ward’s Science is a K-12 science education supplier that inspires science teachers with free classroom activities, how-to videos, tips, tricks, in addition to all the science supplies and resources that make teaching science easier—and more fun.
Ward’s Science supports teachers with hands-on science learning for biology, chemistry, physics, earth science, engineering and more. The hands-on science approach challenges students to apply their knowledge of scientific principles, strengthening their understanding and building career readiness.
Ward’s Science sent me a kit to try out in my classroom with my first graders this year and we LOVED it! I absolutely recommend checking out Ward’s Science Kits to enhance your science instruction.
Each kit includes:
- Lesson plans and worksheets for two hands-on activities
- Materials to complete activities, excluding a few common household items (most materials may be reused)
Bottle Music
I received the Elementary Science Olympiad: Bottle Music kit to use with my students. It came with the “Boomwhacker Tubes,” food coloring, and a book that helped us even play a few songs together. The Bottle Music kit helped our class explore how a vibrating column of air creates a sound and how differing lengths of a column of air change the pitch of the sound. All activities are aligned to Next Generation Science Standards, nationally recognized standards for science instruction, which I greatly appreciate as we were discussing light and sound together in first grade!
In the classroom…
I was easily able to implement this lesson in my classroom with easy to follow lesson plans from Ward’s Science. The kit came with teacher tips and two activity plans. In our whole group lesson, I modeled how various objects can make various sounds with different clear glasses filled to different heights, food coloring, and a pencil to tap on the rim. The students were shocked that each glass produced a different sound! We had a great discussion surrounding why that was and the students made great observations and predictions. We reviewed how vibrations cause sound and pitch is the quality of a sound by the rate of the vibrations producing it. Then, students were able to explore the “boomwhacker tubes” in small groups and try to create different songs. They had a blast!
Thank you Ward’s for sending us this science kit to explore and help make our learning more engaging and fun! Be sure to check out all of Ward’s Science Olympiad Kits here and you can grab this specific Bottle Music Kit that we used here!
Code “LATTE12” will help you save 15% on your next order with Ward’s!
This blog post is sponsored by Ward’s Science.
