How to Engage Students in Science Easily

How to engage students in science – This is a topic that I get questions about a lot from teachers. How do you engage your students in science? In my first few years of teaching, I actually struggled with this. I loved science SO much, but my students just did not have the same love for it as I did. Of course, I rubbed off on them some, but they were not as fully engaged in the content as I’d hope for.

However, as I continued to teach, I started to learn the secret sauce along the way. I learned how to engage students in science class!

I’d like to share some of that secret sauce with you today to get students to science loving!

Is Science Easy or Difficult to Teach?

I’m going to speak to this question based on my experience. I have taught both math and science, and I have taught both subjects at multiple grade levels. So, what do I think?

I think that science can be super easy to teach if you learn how to engage your students in it. I learned from the Wong family in their book, The First Days of School, that as the teacher, you should never go home after work and be tired. The students should be! Since reading this, it has been my goal every year to facilitate more and have the students work more. The doers are the learners, so the students should, in fact, be the ones doing the work. That’s how they learn!

I’ve mainly worked at Title I schools as a middle school teacher, and one of the struggles that I have found is getting the students to WANT to learn. I’m here to tell you that it IS possible. Once your students get that intrinsic motivation (or extrinsic – got to do what you got to do), it’s smooth sailing.

So, how do you get students to actually want to learn materials, especially the dry stuff?

Engaging Science

The fact of the matter is, to get students engaged in the content, and actually want to learn it and not just comply, they have to be curious and begin to wonder about it.

There are many lesson plan templates that follow this line of thinking, such as the 5E model, but I just look at it as hyping students up and then having them to wonder about what else that they don’t know and what would be awesome to figure out.

This is the time where teachers get a chance to show off their excitement for the topic and hype students up to get excited too.

Engaging Students in Science – Example

Ok, so let me give an example, and I’m going to go with a topic that I’m not as excited about, and can be a little dry, unless you make it as awesome as it really is.

Let’s talk about the Periodic Table. You have this table of words and numbers, and it’s a weird shape, and now you have to teach it to your kids.

Well, approach it as the wonderful science that it is. “Look at this AWESOME table that a bunch of scientists have, over the years, come up with to organize ALL of the elements that are on the Earth. Can you imagine being the one that discovered one of these elements?”

Tap into their prior knowledge. What do they already know? What do they want to know? Get them super excited about elements. Can they think of any elements that are their favorite? If they could discover a never seen before element, what would it be? Would they want to discover an element that can make them invisible? I could go on and on! Find out what students are interested in and tap into it.

Just for fun, here are some more motivating ideas for teaching The Periodic Table.

Ways To Engage Your Students

There are so many ways to engage your students in science and cause them to wonder and be intrinsically motivated to learn the material.

You can check out the whole list of 99 Engagement Strategies for Middle School Science here, but I will discuss some fun ways to get your students to wonder right here.

Incorporate Current Events

Going right along with my Periodic Table example from above, what if there was an element discovered in the past year? That would be something awesome to incorporate at the beginning of the lesson. What about mysterious elements that they may find in space?

If you can find a current event that relates to the topic and something they are interested in, you will be a rockstar!

Do your students like football? There are probably a ton of current events that you can tie your force and motion unit into. They can learn how to throw the perfect pass. How does this relate to Newton’s Laws?

Conduct a Demonstration

This is when you get your students to “ooh and ahh”. Demonstrations are great for things that you want your students to see, but either don’t have materials to buy stuff for the whole class or it may be too dangerous for middle school students to do on their own. There are so many scientific activities for you do try!

I know many teachers don’t enough money and/or time to dissect frogs with middle school students; however, this could really hype them up before (or after) a unit on the human body systems.

If you are not ready to let your students do it on their own, you can dissect one and just use it as a demonstration. Get students wondering?

• What are they seeing?
• Do we have these organs in our body?
• Why is this organ beside this organ?
• How are they connected?

Now that they are curious, it’s time to teach!

Citizen Science Projects

What better way to get students excited about content than to let them be the scientist? Research has emphasized the partnership between teachers and scientists to increase authentic science in the classroom.

I have never had students more excited to learn about microscopic organisms than the time that I told them that they might have mites living in their face because 100% of adults do!

My students and I took part in a citizen science project called Meet Your Mites.

I was in a fellowship where I worked with the scientists that were on this project. In my class, we swabbed the students’ cheeks and sent the DNA to the scientists to test for mite DNA. The data, I feel, was inconclusive because there were so many variables that occurred with students being the ones collecting the data.

We did find mite DNA on many students, and the scientists believed that it was mostly on all students. How fun!

The most important thing about this project was that the students learned so much about the scientific process, had a blast, and increased their wonder about microscopic organisms.

There are so many citizen science projects out there for your students to try. Some of my favorites are CoCoRaHs, iNaturalist, and School of Ants.

SciStarter is a great place to start.

Here is an awesome book if you’d like to learn more.

Talk About a Science/STEM Career

Students only know about the jobs that they are exposed to. Nepris Career Explorer is a great tool to help students learn more about different careers they may be interested in.

It’s also a great tool for the teacher to engage their students!

Also, you can just Google cool science jobs and see what comes up.

So, here’s an example. Say that you are about to teach your space unit and about to discuss space exploration.

You can ask your students, “Did you know that there is a job out there were you can help a rover drive around on another planet?”. A lot of students like remote-control cars and things of this sort, so this can help spark their wonder.

Who wouldn’t want to say they’ve driven cars on Mars?

Simple Think-Pair-Share

I’ve used these a lot in my classroom, and it’s great for getting all students engaged and participating. It’s also a great conversation starter.

So, what is a think-pair-share? This is a tool for teachers to use where students first THINK about the answer to the question proposed. After given the time to think about their answers, students can PAIR with a partner and exchange answers with them. Then, they can SHARE their answer with the class if they wish.

So, what does this look like in the classroom? Let’s say you are about to begin teaching physical changes and chemical changes. Show your students a picture of this lion statue outside of the Art Institute of Chicago. Use the think-pair-share strategy to come up with some ideas on what has occurred!

Think-Pair-Share strategies are a great way to introduce science phenomena in the classroom and to get 100% of your students engaged in thinking about it.

There are so many fun ideas to engage your students in science! Here are some more strategies that won’t cost you a dime!

Help your students master science content!