Creative Science Activities That Let Go

To your great relief, none of our creative science activities will ask you to do everything for every student. In fact, you’ll notice a complete shift of who does what in our creative science activities. Students, not you, are the ones doing things. Your job is to stand back, make sure people do what they're supposed to do, and ensure correct outcomes. Then you move in with dialogue when they’re minds are primed and ready. This method may be uncomfortable for you at first. But the rewards are worth it.

By handing over the best part of the creative science activities to students- the demonstration- you are showing trust. Most students will respond to this by rewarding you (and themselves) with a higher level of maturity, and now everyone’s winning. Having come upon something amazing with their own hands, they will naturally go further and manipulate variables, enriching the discussion even more. Now that is real science.

Creative Science Activities Without Magic

While all of our creative science activities were designed to be purposeful and effective, they still won’t magically teach themselves (wouldn’t that be nice if they did?). Teaching a good lesson is hard work, and there will never be a substitute for good preparation and your willingness to put your all into it. But the neat thing is that all that preparation will lead to something magical- the ability to connect with 30 students of varying backgrounds and ability.

What Busyness Does To Your Creative Science Activities

Do you remember the magician from Frosty The Snowman? He was “busy, busy, busy!”. That describes Americans today- always in a hurry trying to accomplish more than we have time for. But things done in a hurry are seldom done well, and that includes the creative science activities we do in our classrooms as well.

Being busy is not in itself a bad thing, and having more creative science activities than we have time for should theoretically result in a better learning environment (since we should be choosing to do the strongest lessons and disregarding the weaker ones; let's call this the natural selection of lesson plans). But sometimes science activities are done just for the sake of doing them, and if most of what we’re “teaching” our students will soon be forgotten, then what’s the point of even doing it?

Our creative science activities take a balanced approach. They don’t try to go all directions at once, nor is it all fluff and fun. There is terminology and concepts, but we also want to develop the creative and practical part of each student’s mind. Each creative science activity stays steadily focused on just 1 thing or theme from beginning to end. And they tend to be simple and quiet so that your students can keep a sustained thought and actually have some room left over in their minds to think creatively and to explore.

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