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Following on from Se7en Easy Science Notebook Ideas… here come Se7en easy Activities to get the observational juices flowing:

• Plants – Flower Pressing: My kids love this there is something magical about hiding a flower in a press for a couple of days and out it comes in all its splendor. 

  

  And if you don’t have a flower press don’t worry about it – you would be amazed at what you can do with a fat book.

  

• Animals – Tracking: You may not have access to zebra or buck tracks… 

  

  So we used clay and toy animals just for fun.

  

  Not deeply accurate, but lots of fun and certainly kept everyone observing and thinking about different footprints.

  

• Rocks – Collecting – these have to be collected, have to, have to, have to! 

  

  The Hoods all have heaps of stones they have collected from the local Scratch Patch. Great volumes of precious stones cry out to be sorted and classified and organized:

  

  I have a fossil collection from my childhood that they love to explore.

  

• Space – Constellation Recognition: We printed some constellations off the web, I did a quick google for constellation flash cards and found these lovely big and bold ones at Eclectic Homeschool Online. We traced them onto paper with white crayons. 

  

  Then drew as many stars as we wanted to.

  

  We inked over them and everyone had a constellation or two that they now know and can name and talk about.

  

• Human body – Measurement and Graphing: There are so many easy human body projects: keep a food diary, do a fingerprint hunt, anything microscopic. And naturally there are heaps of measuring activities, which easily take you onto plotting graphs and then assessing the graphs (Ssh! We would never call this math, it is practical science!). My kids love this, seeing who is/isn’t growing, who is outstripping who and so!!! 

  

• Technology – Appliance demise: Oh the science of taking things apart… and dare I say we do a lot of this! Appliances are always reaching the end of their tether, if yours aren’t just lend them to us and they will suffer an overuse injury and be ready for dismantling. And here goes the beyond functioning orange squeezer, that really should have been tossed… but wasn’t. 

  

• Weather – Cloud Study: A fun weather project is to take a cloud photograph every day for a couple of days and notice the changes, compare the actual weather forecast with your cloud based prediction. 

  

That’s it, the end of Se7en Observing Science, for now. When I began writing about science I said that we have split our science into three sections: Observational, Research and Experimental. Next week I will start looking at How se7en do Scientific Research.

I popped this post onto the Works For Me Wednesday Site – go and have a look there for all sorts of tips on absolutely anything.

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