Science activity
Choose Your Own Experiment
Look around your world and ask one wonder question. 'Why is the sky blue?' 'Why do leaves fall?' Ask it out loud!
Materials and setup
- journal
- pencil
- graph paper
- materials depend on chosen experiment
How this changes by age
Pre-K (ages 3–4)
Look around your world and ask one wonder question. 'Why is the sky blue?' 'Why do leaves fall?' Ask it out loud!
Steps
- Walk around inside or outside with a grown-up and find ONE thing that makes you wonder. Say your wonder question out loud. A grown-up writes it down for you.
- Tell a grown-up one thing that surprised you.
Learning objectives
- Practice noticing and asking about the world
Kindergarten (ages 5–6)
Pick one wonder question about your world and ask a grown-up to help you find one fact about it.
Steps
- Pick a wonder question (Why does ice melt? Why do birds fly south? Why is grass green?) and ask a grown-up to help you find one true thing about it from a book or a kid-safe website.
- Tell a grown-up one thing that surprised you.
Learning objectives
- Form a question and seek one piece of information about it
Early elementary (ages 6–8)
Pick a wonder question, make a guess, and try one simple test to see if your guess was right.
Steps
- Pick a question you can test at home (Does warm water dissolve sugar faster than cold water? Do paper airplanes fly farther with weight on the nose?). Make a guess, run one quick test, and tell a grown-up if your guess was right or wrong.
- In one sentence, tell a parent or sibling what surprised you today.
Learning objectives
- Connect a question to a simple, testable experiment
- Compare a prediction to a result
Upper elementary (ages 8–10)
Pick a real question, design a controlled experiment with three trials per condition, run it for 2+ weeks, and write a 1-page report.
Steps
- Pick ONE question from this list — or invent your own: Does temperature affect how fast sugar dissolves? Which soil grows beans best? Does music affect plant growth? Does the angle of a ramp affect how far a marble rolls?
- Write a hypothesis: a clear sentence that predicts what will happen and why.
- Design a controlled experiment. Identify exactly ONE variable you will change (the independent variable). Identify what you will measure (the dependent variable). List everything you will hold constant.
- Run THREE trials of each condition (so you can see if your results are reliable, not a fluke). Build a clean data table with rows for each trial.
- Run the experiment for at least 2 weeks if it involves growth; for shorter experiments, run it on at least 2 separate days.
- Analyze your data: average each condition's three trials. Make a graph (bar or line) that shows the comparison clearly.
- Write a 1-page report: question, hypothesis, materials, procedure, data table, graph, conclusion. In your conclusion, say whether your hypothesis was supported, and what you'd test next.
- In one sentence, tell a parent or sibling what surprised you today.
Learning objectives
- Design a controlled experiment with one variable, three trials per condition, and a measured outcome
- Distinguish hypothesis, independent variable, dependent variable, and controls
- Communicate findings in a 1-page structured report
Safety and evidence note
Read the full activity before beginning. An adult should supervise tools, heat, food, outdoor work, movement, and experiments as appropriate. Completion records that the activity was done; the child’s explanation, work sample, photo, or demonstration is stronger evidence of learning than a completion check alone.
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