Science: Activities & Games

ACSI/Purposeful Design Publications does not endorse these resources and recommends that each one be evaluated for usefulness and appropriateness prior to use in the classroom. ACSI does not guarantee the functionality of the resource links, since each link is maintained by each individual website developer.

All Grades

Simple Science Experiments for School or Home

Steve Spangler Science: Presents Making Science Fun!, which offers this collection of simple science experiments that give an explanation of what occurred in each experiment.
KidZone: This Super Simple Science Section presents easy-to-do experiments as well as fun science facts.
Hunkin’s Experiments: Provides interesting experiments that are hand drawn with cartoons, like How to Make an Onion Glow.
Scholastic, Magic School Bus: Offers a variety of simple science experiments, where students can write in their results.
Science at Home: Provides experiments in several areas of science. Each experiment is rated for difficulty, danger and show. Many also include photos and a video.
Madsci: This Edible/Inedible Experiments Archive offers experiments in astronomy, biology, chemistry, earth science and physics. Age appropriateness is given at the beginning of each experiment.
The Teacher’s Corner: This page gives a simple but affective kinetic energy experiment with an apple. Select Experiments to find many more.
Exploratorium: Great simple experiments in all areas of science are offered on this site. A brief synopsis of each experiment and time required is provided.
Women in Mining: Offer this site with lessons about minerals. Though the lessons are not rated for grade levels, they have free downloadable hands-on minerals activities.
Neuroscience for Kids: Offers many experiments and activities about the senses. They are briefly written, use simple materials, and list grade levels.
Howard Hughes Medical Institute: Provides excellent simple activities such as studying small things without a microscope and dust.
Scholastic: This Dirtmeister’s Science Lab site offers several experiments in physical, earth and life science. Each experiment includes a short teaching and an experiment.

Games: Printable Games

Jefferson Lab: A collection of printable puzzles, worksheets and lab pages are available—such as hangman, bingo and cryptographs.
Discovery School: Puzzlemaker enables you to create a variety of puzzles on-line.

Games: Internet Interactive Games

Vivify STEM Videos – The top ten STEM video resources to engage your students in your STEM lessons. There are hundreds of videos are many are 3 minutes or less so will fit easily into your lesson.
Jefferson Lab: On-line Science games and puzzles are provided at this site.
Jefferson County Schools: This site includes activities for all science areas. Choose your science and your age group. Very good site.
BBC: This site has interactive activities for ages 5–11 on all types of science areas. Very good.

Life Science—The Human Body

BBC: This site furnishes a variety of interactive games for all ages. After choosing an age group, the student can pick from a variety of sciences. Human body categories include health, ourselves, moving and growing, and hearing and sight.

Earth and Space Science

Mr Nussbaum: Simulate the Northern lights by causing a variety of gases to collide at this site.

Grades K–2

Simple Science Experiments for School or Home

Aggie Horticulture: This site provides a long list of simple activities about plants for primary children.

Games: Internet Interactive Games

Primary Games: These on-line science games for primary grades are carefully organized by grade level and topic.

Physical Science

Edheads, Simple Machines: Brings an interactive game about simple machines and compound machines.
BBC, Motion: Another excellent BBC Internet activity, on motion teaches how weight and friction affect motion. Grades 2–3.
Mikids: This is an Internet activity on simple machines, other lessons are offered by grade level. Grades 2–3.

Earth and Space Science

A Kid’s Heart: This site has several ocean activities for primary students, one is a paint site—paint your own ocean scene using stamps.
Harcourt School Publishers: A Food Webs Interactive site is good for review. This site includes meadow, arctic and pond food webs.
First School Years: Supplies primary worksheets for various science topics including a sun experiment, identifying day and night animals, a foil investigation and vocabulary words.

Grades 3–5

Simple Science Experiments for School or Home

HotChalk’s Lesson Plans Page: Students choose an element from the periodic table and design an edible atom complete with protons, neutrons, electrons and if you get really crazy you can have them add mesons, quarks and gluons.

Games: Printable Games

New resources coming soon.

Games: Internet Interactive Games

New resources coming soon.

Life Science—The Human Body

Kathi Mitchell: Select a bone of this hand-drawn skeleton to zoom in and discover its name. Contains on-line science questions about plants, food chains, the human body and includes SAT questions.

Life Science—Animals and Habitats

The Ocean Adventure: This is an outstanding internet ocean expeditions site. Each expedition has been chronicled complete with photos, data and daily journals, as well as additional resources such as a vocabulary list, maps, and additional reading. Excellent site. The journals are long but written well so that upper elementary would enjoy them.

Life Science—Plants

The University of Illinois Extension, The Great Plant Escape: Is an upper elementary educational game. There are six different cases to solve — each one is in-depth and covers several different topics. There are also print-outs to go with the games. Great technology integration activity.

Physical Science

BBC, Weight and Friction: Another excellent BBC internet activity, teaches how weight and friction affect motion. Grades 2–3.
Mikids: This internet activity is about simple machines. Other lessons are offered by grade level. Grades 2–3.

Earth and Space Science

NASA, Star Child: This is not so much a game as an interactive site about space. Choose a topic and learn information, view pictures and answer questions. With regard to time in history, it states, Scientists think that the solar system is more than four billion years old, thus presenting this concept as an idea rather than a fact.
Windows to the Universe: This site provides mostly on-line puzzles and games, but also has some printables.
NASA, Earth Science Enterprise: Provides a variety of internet puzzles and games for children.