stem activities for kids Archives

We live in an apartment in the city but are lucky enough to have a terrace we fill with green! Our home is full of easy-to-care for plants and even random beans and lentils that sprout because our daughter plays with them outside. We make sure to bring nature into our life even when living in the city because it is so important for children (and us adults too). Tending to plants is a lovely way to connect with nature with your children. We water the plants together, deadhead them too (work on scissor skills), we even repot plants together, try to grow cuttings and plant lentils and beans. These last ones are great! They grow really fast and you can use them in nature activities like the one I will explain below. It is the perfect activity to learn about plants and to sneak in some STEM skills through play! So read on to find out how to create your own STEM Nature Box.

Easy STEM Nature Box Activity

You can separate this activity into two so that you can have your kids happy and entertained twice!

Preparation

If you live close to nature go for a nature walk and collect all sorts of plants and flowers. Pull some out with the roots if you can. If your kids are into it don’t limit it to gathering plants, include sticks, pinecones, stones… The activity will focus on plants but it can include other things too!

If you live in the city and don’t have a chance to get to nature easily don’t worry! You will have to do some planting first, wait for it to grow, and then go ahead with the activity. Even if you have nature close by, gardening and planting seeds is great to do with children. You can use this later in the activity to remind them of how plants grow and they will love seeing that little green sprout coming out of the soil. So go ahead and plant beans or lentils as soon as you can so you can eventually do the activity. You won’t get any flowers but you will be able to pull the plant out and check the roots out!!

STEM Nature Box

The idea behind this activity is that you are preparing food for animals in a STEM Nature box. You can stick to just plants in the box or you can add anything to it. We added lentils and oats and even shells that we had collected from the beach.

Materials

Plants
Tray to put the plants before sorting them (optional)
Additional “food”: sticks, stones, dry food such as lentils or oats
Box (we used an old wine box but any shoe box will do)
Scissors
Animals, dolls or toys that will be “fed”

Once you have collected all the wonderful natural materials lay them all out on a tray and see if your kid is interested in preparing food for the animals. My daughter loves farm animals and feeding them so this was a perfect activity for her and it kept her entertained for a long time! At this point you can do two things:

Invite them to feed the animals and let them do it their own way
Guide the activity

It’s really up to you and kids really learn through playing and exploring. Check out The Do’s And Don’ts of Free Play: A STEM Perspective for more information. With my 3-year-old, I just let her organize and separate with minimal guidance. As she separated we talked about what she was doing and I showed her the different parts of the plants and that was enough. Having said this, if you want to guide the activity a bit more here are my suggestions:

Sneak in some STEM:

Get your kids to separate the different parts of the plants into leaves, stems, roots, flowers and make different piles in your box for different animals. By doing this your kids are practicing sorting, organizing and categorizing and learning the different parts of the plant.
Have some nature talks: Remind them how you planted the beans/lentils and you watered them and they eventually grew into plants. You can ask them things like “which part of the plant do you think was in charge of taking in the water?” “How long was the stem before the leaves started to grow?”
Once you see the activity is coming to an end you can ask them again what they fed each animal (stems, leaves, flowers, roots?)

By handling the plants with their hands, having planted them beforehand, you are giving your child the chance to really experience the world they live in. And by turning it into a game of “feeding the animals” they are learning through play. Talking and asking questions while they play, or once they are done will get them to reflect on how plants grow and will reinforce a way to look at things (by categories).

We talked about the different parts of the plants. We observed how some leaves were brown and talked about why. She even referred to the roots later on and said “the doggie likes roots” and picked some out for the toy dog. Once the sorting was done, my daughter decided she wanted to put food in a bowl so she brought out some plastic containers and we made a soup together by adding water! Creating a wonderful messy and sensory experience!! Let them guide the playtime now and just enjoy and explore with them.

More Fun Activities and Games:

Happy STEM learning!

Oh the scientific method! Such a structured way to exploration but so helpful when taking on a big scientific project. Scientists and researchers use this method when trying to answer questions about our world. Following the scientific method allows researchers to have a guide that helps them organize all the information. Because let’s face it, nowadays the information at our fingertips is so huge! With this STEM experiment, you can help your children get an understanding of using the scientific method in a fun and educational way.

**Check out our Simple Science Project For Kids: Float or Sink for a simple play-based version of the Float or Sink experiment! Perfect for younger kids or if you are looking for a less structured activity.**

Having a tool like the scientific method is very useful. And introducing it to your kids will help them with problem-solving and analytical skills. It will give them a way to structure their thoughts when problems arise. It also shows them to take their time to think about the problem and analyze different perspectives before choosing the best solutions.

Some Background Information

The scientific method is used by scientists to structure their research and make the process of discovering something more efficient and effective.

The steps to the scientific method are the following:

Question
Research
Hypothesis
Experiment
Analyze
Conclusion

As you can see, there are many steps before starting any experiment. By researching and writing down your hypothesis first you will be able to set up the perfect experiment to answer the question. You will also have some background knowledge that will help you when doing the experiment.

STEM Experiment: Let’s find out the Answer to…

The Question

So here is a question for your children:

Why do you think things float or sink?

They probably have some ideas and answers for this. Encourage them to write down their original thoughts so that you can compare them once you are done with the STEM experiment.

Here you can find a free printable to fill out as the experiment goes on.

Time to Research

Research is usually done by reading and reading and more reading of scientific papers, journals and relevant material. We are not going to do this 🙂 We will move the research along by asking our kids some questions. So let’s get your kids brain to work a bit:

Think of objects that float/don’t float, what are they made of? How big are they?
Do you float in water? Can you make yourself float more or less? (By filling your lungs with air and holding your breath you will float more)
Show them a list of materials, do you think materials matter?
Show them different sized objects or images of objects, do you think size matters?
What other things do you think affect the ability of an object to float or sink?

Write down a Hypothesis you want to test

Now that you have brainstormed about why an object floats or not you can make a hypothesis or more than one! But first, what is a hypothesis?

A hypothesis is an idea or explanation for something that needs to be proved
A hypothesis tries to answer the question of your research (in this case, why do things float or sink?)
A hypothesis is proved through experiments and testing

Some ways you can express your hypothesis:

Things made out of _______ float/sink
Things that are ___________ float/sink
Floating depends on ______________

Time to test those Hypotheses

Once you’ve made a hypothesis, ask your child how you could test it. Here are a few examples of experiments you could do with them but feel free to come up with your own!

First step in any experiment is to gather the materials you are going to test and any tools you might need. For any experiment you are going to need:

Objects to test (different sizes, materials and shape)
Water, in a bucket, in the sink, in the bathtub, in a small outdoor pool
Paper and pencil to write down your findings

Ways you can experiment and make your children think about the hypotheses:

Categorize the objects you have collected and test their floating ability by pairs:

○ same material, different size

○ same material, different shape

○ same size, different weight

Get plastic containers and fill them with different materials and test the floating capabilities, for example:

○ empty container

○ container filled with cotton (what happens when cotton gets wet?)

○ container filled with sand

○ container filled with water

○ container filled with sticks

○ container filled with coins

○ container filled with stones

Do the same with a glass container

There is a list of materials and object ideas in the guide for inspiration. Let them experiment and play 🙂 there is no rush to finish the activity! Don’t forget to write down your findings so you can analyze them later!

Let’s analyze those Resultats

Now it’s time to look back on your STEM experiment and the results to see if your hypothesis was correct. You can ask the hypothesis back in question form and see if the results support it! Other questions you can ask to discover why certain objects float:

Does wood/plastic/metal/stone float?
Does shape or weight matter?
What containers could float? Which ones would sink? What was inside of them?

Conclusion Time

So did you find out why things float? Did you test your hypothesis? Did you get some fun ideas about other things you could test with this method? Did more questions pop up as you experimented? Welcome to the STEM world! The questions never end 🙂 and this is oh so important for your children to experience. How to answer questions using the scientific method is a must in the STEM world. If you want a more detailed answer to why things float you can download the printable guide, there is an explanation at the end. But I’m sure that you will have a pretty good idea about the answer from all that scientific experimenting you will do 😉

So to finish up the activity you can talk about what you discovered and if there are more things you would like to research together. If you have any topics you would like me to cover just comment below and I’d be happy to write a post about it in the future. I hope you enjoyed this activity and had fun experimenting and discovering how our world works.

For more information about STEM and how to transform your STEM activities at home, check out these posts:

Check out other fun STEM activities to sneak in some STEM learning:

Happy STEM learning!