Do you teach about natural vs. synthetic materials? What is the difference between natural and synthetic materials? This goes with the Next Generation Science Standard: MS-PS1-3 “Gather and make sense of information to describe that synthetic materials come from natural resources and impact society”. This also goes great with any standards dealing with physical and chemical properties, chemical reactions, natural resources, and more!
It’s such a wonderful topic to teach because many of the things that students use everyday are synthetic. There are also so many great things yet to be created, and who knows, one of your students may be the one to create it!
In this post, I’m going to share with you how you can bring the WOW Factor to your science classroom when you are teaching about natural vs. synthetic materials to your wonderful middle school students. First, I share some WONDER activities that will get your students engaged and explore synthetic materials. Next, I share an interactive lesson that will be an awesome addition to your lesson plan to help meet this topic standard. Finally, I share some WIDEN activities to allow students to apply what they’ve learned and to extend their knowledge!
Synthetic and Natural Materials WONDER Strategies
Let’s work to first get your students excited to learn more about this topic! Let’s get them hooked in with a WONDER strategy. These strategies are those things that you do at the beginning of a lesson to help students become internally motivated to learn. Here are two ideas for the topic of natural vs. synthetic materials.
What Was It Made From? Stations
Have you ever seen the show “How It’s Made?” It’s really neat to learn where items we use almost daily are made. Sometimes, you don’t know what you don’t know!
To get your students excited about diving deeper into synthetic materials and natural materials, you need to get their brain thinking about where things come from.
So, here’s what you can do.
- Set up stations around the room with the following items: a cotton t-shirt (natural), wool sock (natural), silk fabric (natural), plastic spoon (synthetic), crayons (synthetic), silicone baking mold (synthetic). You can use other options. Just make sure to have a variety of natural and synthetic materials.
- For each station, ask the following questions:
- Do you think this item comes from nature or is human-made? Why?
- What do you think this item might have been originally?
This will get students thinking about where these everyday materials come from and how they are made!
Clothing Labels
Another fun thing to do is to get students to look at the clothing that they wear and start thinking about where they come from!
Some days before you start this lesson, tell students that you want them to bring in an item of clothing. Please be specific with middle school students. If you know, you know! Tell them to bring in a shirt or a pair of shorts or pants. You can make it easy and tell them to just bring in their favorite shirt!
In class, have students to look at their labels and compare them. Talk about natural and synthetic materials. Is their shirt made from natural or synthetic materials? How do they know?
This will get them intrigued and interested to learn more about natural vs synthetic fibers.
Natural vs. Synthetic Materials Interactive Lesson
Interactive lessons are GREAT for teaching. They use the 7 steps to help students retain information. Overall, students are given a piece of information, then a question or activity to process the information.
If you give students too much information at a time, they end up not learning anything at all. This is what interactive lessons strive to avoid. Students love them too!
You can actually check out some free ones here!
In this Synthetic Materials Interactive Lesson, students learn about natural resources, natural materials, synthetic materials, polymers and monomers, natural vs synthetic examples, natural vs synthetic resources, positive and negative impacts of human-made materials, and more!
There are embedded activities including a KWL, drag-and-drop activities, a Venn diagram, and more!
Synthetic Materials WIDEN Activities
At this point, your students have learned a lot, and that is awesome! Now, it’s time to see what they’ve learned as well as extend their knowledge using WIDEN Activities! If time allows, it’s always great to add an extension. These activities are also great for those students who have moved through the material quickly.
How It’s Made
One of the things that you can do with students to WIDEN their knowledge on synthetic materials is to watch an episode of “How It’s Made” that I mentioned earlier.
This is a great way to WIDEN knowledge!
There are ways to stream it, but they also have a YouTube Channel. You can watch snippets of episodes there!
It’s a great starter of discussion as well. Find one that interests students the most. You can let them vote!
Make Cornstarch Plastic
Have students explore making cornstarch plastic. Remember, many synthetic materials are made from polymers. Some of these, like bioplastics, can be created by processing and heating chemicals derived from corn. You can form a polymer called polylactic acid (PLA) when the starch from plants like corn is broken down. It forms plastic-like materials.
To make this bioplastic, you can gather the following materials:
- Cornstarch
- Vegetable oil
- Water
- Ziplock bag
- Spoon
- Tablespoon measuring spoon
- Dropper
- Microwave
- Plastic plate
- Take a tablespoon of cornstarch and put it in a Ziplock bag.
- Now, pour a tablespoon of water in the same bag.
- Squish it together.
- Add 2 drops of vegetable oil.
- Leave the bag partially open and place it on the plastic plate.
- Microwave it for about 20 seconds.
- Wait for it to cool, observe, and record observations.
For a video tutorial, check this one out by Science Beyond.
Which of these activities will you add to your natural vs. synthetic materials lesson plan?
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