3 Fun Science Activities for Middle School Students that Widen Their Content Knowledge

There are so many fun science activities for middle school students that allow for them to be engaged and begin to wonder in class in addition to learning the materials without being overwhelmed. You can even create engaging lessons that students will be obsessed with!

So, your students are engaged, and the content is taught. What’s next? This is your opportunity as a teacher to widen student knowledge and take them above and beyond what is required. This allows students to explore the content deeper and gain a better understanding of it. This is also an opportunity for students to show off what they have learned.

Widening Student Knowledge in Middle School Science

Widening student knowledge with a variety of classroom activities in science class is essential. If you look at the 5E lesson model, this represent the extend and elaborate stage. This is where students are able to really solidify their understanding of the content knowledge and connect it to real-life applications.

This is an important piece that can really enrich the lesson. If students “get it”, this gives them a chance to apply what they have learned, but if you have students that don’t quite “get it” yet, this gives them the right set of circumstances to correct any misunderstandings with teacher and fellow student guidance.

There are so many things that you can do to widen student knowledge. In this post, I will dive deeper into 3 of these things!

1. Science Experiments for Middle School Students

One of the best things that you can do is to allow students to do an experiment or a series of fun hands-on activities that gives students that real-world experience with the content.

There are so many fun science experiments for middle school students!

Here are some examples:

• When learning about Earth’s forces: gravity, friction, and magnetism, you can take students through a series of activities to explore these forces. You can learn more here.
• Teaching physical and chemical changes? Stations are a great way to dive deeper and see the changes in action. Some of my favorites are a salt and water mixture, rusted nails, a browned apple or banana, Oobleck, baking soda and vinegar, and crumpled paper. You can see more information about these stations here.
• When your students are learning about Newton’s Laws, a fun activity for students to apply their knowledge is the egg drop challenge. Students can create a prototype container that will protect a raw egg from breaking when it is dropped. Student’s love this!
• Teaching waves? You can actually do so many things with this. Slinkys are my favorite! You can also do virtual science experiments as well. Learn more here!

This is just scratching the surface on all of the hands-on science experiments that can be done!

Don’t have time to do a science experiment or just needing ideas? There are some great videos to check out. Here are some good ones!

• Sick Science (Steve Spangler) – His enthusiasm is contagious!
• Science Buddies – There are lots of great science experiment ideas here!
• STEMBite – Science is everywhere!

2. Fun with Science Outdoors

Learning outdoors is a great way to keep students engaged and extend their content knowledge. There are so many easy activities for middle school students to do outside.

Science experiments can be done outdoors, or you can use the outdoors to extend student knowledge.

I love taking them outdoors because, a lot of students don’t go outside much (thanks video games and social media), so it’s great to just get them outside. It’s also nice for a change of scenery. Here are some great examples for fun science activities to do outside:

• Explore abiotic and biotic factors: Have your students to find one abiotic and one biotic factor and give them a writing prompt. You could also have students find a series of biotic and abiotic factors on a scavenger hunt!
• You can also take them outside to find real-world examples of energy transfer. For example, solar energy is a given. They can also discuss how that solar energy is absorbed by the plants and transferred to chemical energy. Make it a game. First group to 10 examples gets a prize!
• Another fun thing to do outdoors is to explore plants. If students are learning about how plants survive, defend, and reproduce, they can go outside to see real-life examples!

Here are more ideas!

Project Learning Tree is also an awesome resource!

3. Podcasts – Easy Science Activities

Podcasts are great for exposing students to real-world current events and research that surrounds the topic you are teaching. They are full of fun science facts for middle school students.

There are a lot of fun podcasts for students to listen to:

• Brains On!
• Tumble
• The Show About Science

This multiverse episode is sure to be a hit in the space unit!

You can also have your students create their own!

More Middle School Science Activities to Widen Student Knowledge

There are so many engaging activities that you can do to help extend and widen your students content knowledge! Enjoy!

Help your students master science content!