Great Science Ideas for Kids Age 5+

We love kid science in our house, especially ideas that don’t require a lot of set up and clean up. I always love to look through terrific science ideas for kids age 5+ from After School participants. Today I am sharing some after school science play that we’ve done in the past couple of weeks, and best science experiments linked last week.

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Science on Planet Smarty Pants

As every child, my daughter adores ideas that involve color and food coloring. Food coloring of their own is one “must have” ingredient for young scientists, together with soda and vinegar. Buggy and Buddy shared a simple but spectacular experiment exploring density a few weeks ago with water, oil, and food coloring, and Smarty loved it. She spent at least an hour trying it out – goodbye, our vegetable oil!
We also did another, more involved, experiment a couple of weekends ago making sparkling bath stones based on 101 Kids Activities book by Holly Homer and Rachel Miller. A great part about that project was independent work – my 7 year old could do all of it with minimal supervision following instructions in the book.

Science Ideas from After School Participants

1. I am impressed with “natural watercolors” Learn, Play, Imagine produced from the flowers growing in her backyard. The photography in this post is gorgeous! It’s certainly a parent-led project, since it requires hot water, but there is a lot in this experiment that children can do on their own. I think we want to try that!
2. Slime seems to be a very popular sensory play, especially for younger kids. I expect we will be doing it again this fall, and I love this interesting fall take of pumpkin slime – also from Learn, Play, Imagine:

3. Solargratiamom has an interesting post with a lot of activities to learn about different types of tissues in human body. I think my daughter would love the part about blisters:

4. Another fun health science demonstration – showing how soap works by making germs scatter with pepper and dishwasher soap experiment at Fantastic Fun and Learning. To be fair, soap doesn’t quite works that way, but this is a fun visual for younger kids.

5. Last, but not least, Happiness Is Here shared a great experiment on oxygen and what happens when a candle is lit in a closed container. It’s certainly on our list of things to do!

More Science Ideas for Kids Age 5+?

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