Beautiful Hands-on Activities For Preschoolers: STEM Nature Eggs

A simple project which includes some hands-on activities with a lot of learning potential. This project is great for preschoolers but can be done with younger or older kids. It will get you and your little ones exploring nature, working on motor skills and developing scientific vocabulary through observation and play. I love that it is such a simple project but at the same time involves different hands-on activities that can be done together as a family and that offer teachable moments. I would recommend doing the project over the weekend when you have time for all the different steps and can truly engage in a way that is beneficial for your kids.

Why Use Hands-On Activities For Preschoolers?

Hands-on activities are a great way to get your kids motivated and engaged. By allowing our kids to use their hands, the learning experience moves away from abstract concepts toward something that they can relate to. This creates the perfect environment to boost learning! It is especially important for preschoolers to engage in hands-on learning as they develop vocabulary. Even more so when dealing with scientific concepts such as melting or freezing. It is very difficult to understand these concepts if they cannot experience it with their own senses. By giving them the chance to engage in fun hands-on activities you are creating the perfect environment to nurture their curiosity and sneak in some STEM.

STEM Nature Egg Project

The project is very simple and involves a number of hands-on activities for preschoolers that you can all do together. Enjoy the process and don’t try to rush to the final product. Give you and your kids time to explore. Here are the materials you will need and the steps with some tips and suggestions to sneak in STEM skills and learning opportunities.

Materials

Empty egg shells (we used 6)
Egg carton
Natural materials
Water
Containers for water

Project And Hands-On Activities For Preschoolers Or Older Kids

1. Prepare the eggshells

Preparation is a very important part of any project. In this case, we need to empty the egg shells before we can fill them up again. The night before you intend to do this project make sure to use those eggs for dinner! Scrambled eggs or an omelette are always a fast and easy meal at our home. Get your kids to help, involve them in the process.

The egg needs to be cracked open at the top, we used a spoon to bang the top of the eggshell. Empty the eggshell, rinse them and place them back in the egg carton. Make sure to peel enough shell away so that it can later be easily filled with all the lovely things you will collect.

2. Have a nature walk to collect materials

I love involving nature in any activity we do. It is so important and beneficial to take time out of our busy lives and just be in nature so go ahead and take a nature walk to gather materials. It can be in your garden, around your neighbourhood or even drive somewhere and make a small trip out of it. Take your time to talk about colors, plants, the different textures or sounds in nature. You can make a game out of it by asking your kids to find certain materials. Preschoolers love searching for things, for example:

Can you find something red?
Can you find something soft?

3. Fill the eggshells with natural materials and water

Bring the egg carton out with all the empty eggshells. Have your kids fill them with the natural materials you collected. At this point you can just let them do their thing or you can guide the activity a bit and sneak in some STEM skills. For example, have them sort the different materials using different senses and see what happens:

Use your eyes to sort by color or type of flower
Try using your nose to sort by smell
Use your hands to sort by touch (soft/rough)

Once all the eggshells are full have your kids pour some water into them and place the egg carton with your nature eggs in the freezer. Time to ask some questions and explore concepts:

What do you think will happen?
Explore the different concepts of liquid/solid, freeze/melt, cold/hot, water/ice and develop their vocabulary. This can be done by just talking about the subjects
If you are doing this with older kids you can make a before and after chart with this vocabulary

4. Prepare a hands-on exploration station

Once the water has frozen, set up a space for exploration and play. Have a bowl of warm water to help peel the eggs (we found that it was difficult to peel the eggs right out of the freezer so we used warm water to melt the ice a bit and make it easier to peel the eggs). Let them explore and make observations. Ask questions and use these observations to explain concepts if you wish. For example:

What happens when you put the frozen nature eggs in the water?
Can you see anything happening to the ice?
What happens to the natural materials?
What happens to the temperature of the bowl of water?

My 3-year-old daughter observed that the ice floated and got smaller! Great scientific observation and great invitation to talk about what is happening, why the ice was getting smaller. Keep playing and exploring as long as your kids are happy and entertained. My kid went on to prepare flower soup for everyone, she put all the frozen nature eggs in the bowl, added water and mixed it all until the ice disappeared and only the natural materials were left. It was pretty cool! So just play and experiment with what you have at hand and have fun with your kids.

To finish off I will leave you with a summary of STEM concepts that you can use throughout these hands-on activities for preschoolers.

STEM Concepts and Skills:

Collecting, sorting, categorizing and observing
States of matter: liquid/solid water/ice
Change of state: freeze/melt
Temperature: hot/cold
Float/sink
Problem solving: how can you get the flowers out of the ice?

Thinking and reflecting on why things happen: a lot happens in this simple hands-on project and it is simple enough for children to start observing and making conclusions by themselves so keep asking open-ended questions that start with why do you think…? Or what do you see…? Or what happens…? and watch how their little brains work.

Hope to have inspired some hands-on fun you can do with your preschooler.

More Fun Activities and Games:

Multisensory Learning: The Sound and Feel of Materials

Learning new things while using your senses helps create a stronger connection to the concepts you are learning. By involving different senses during an educational experience we help our kids learn in a more engaging way. We also help deepen the knowledge they acquire through the experience. This multisensory learning activity aims to teach children about different materials through less-used senses such as hearing and touch. It is a great activity for parents and/or teachers to introduce or reinforce the topic of materials.

I remember when I was studying to be an engineer, any class related to materials was extremely boring. A lot of information about their properties and characteristics was thrown at us and we were just expected to memorize it. The problem with this type of learning is that you will not retain the information for long and it is a pity because materials are extremely important in STEM-related fields. One needs to be able to select the appropriate materials for a specific project that has specific requirements. Having said this, I believe that giving children the chance to explore the topic of materials in a more hands-on approach will give them a positive connection to the subject. And this always helps with motivation and learning!

Preparation and Guidance

This multisensory learning activity will help children explore materials and their properties by using their hands and ears! So the first thing you need to do is gather objects made out of different materials. Here are some suggestions:

Wood
Plastic
Textile (wool, cotton, silk)
Metal (coins)
Ceramic
Paper
Here is a page with different types of materials and properties: http://www.lovemyscience.com/facts-materials.html

Once you have collected the materials it is time to explore. For younger kids, select 3 different materials to start with. If they like the activity and are motivated you can start it all over again with 3 new materials. For older kids, you could start with 5. Begin by telling them that you are going to explore these objects just with your hands. Tell them to close their eyes and grab an object. Once they have it in their hands ask them some of the following questions (write down the answers):

Does it feel hard or soft?
Is it heavy or light?
Is it flexible or stiff? Can it bend without breaking?
Does it feel rough or smooth?

Now that you have explored some materials with your hands it is time to use your ears! For each material look at your answers and then try to make a sound with the object by hitting it, scratching it or any other way you can think of. Try to find a connection! Connections always make information stay longer in the brain 😉

Is there any connection between the way a material sounds and its properties?

Finally, after you have explored and looked for connections it is time to play a game and have some fun with what you learned!

Multisensory Learning Activity: Guess the Material

The STEM game is a simple guessing game in which kids will need to use their hands and ears to identify the materials. Basically, you will ask your children to close their eyes and then either give them an object they have to explore with their hands or make a sound with one of the objects. See if they can guess the type of material! Depending on your children’s’ age they can either guess directly with their eyes closed or they can give the object back to you and you mix it in with the other objects. When they open their eyes they have to look at the objects and try to guess which one it was.

To make it a bit more educational they can also try to identify properties first before they say what type of material it is. For this, you would first ask the same questions you did at the beginning with slight variations depending on if they are touching or listening:

Does it feel/sound hard or soft? Heavy or light? Flexible or stiff? Rough or smooth?

If children know the properties well you can ask in the following way:

What do you think if feels/sounds like?

I challenge you to try it out with them and not just be the moderator! Play with your kids and see if you can also guess the materials! We rely so heavily on sight that even these simple activities might be a bit more complicated than we expect. You could even try your sense of smell for this activity! Who knows what you might discover. I hope you enjoyed this little activity and that you have fun giving your senses some time to explore something different.

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

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

STEM Experiment: Scientific Method Float or Sink Activity

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!