The Scientific Method for Kids

So you want to teach the scientific method for kids? I don't want to reinvent the wheel here, but I'm finding it's not so easy to find good scientific method lesson plans! A lot of links out there are outdated.

I'll try to do a better job keeping up on mine.

  • Here's a scientific method workbook from the U.S. government. This one is for grades 2-6, and it is subtitled "A Guide to Teaching Students the Scientific Method Using the Experimental Design Model with an Emphasis on Energy Science Fair Projects." It has a number of experiments to do; it's quite good.
  • And if you're looking for some science fair projects, this is a great set of ideas from the NEED project! They also have a curriculum guide for all grade levels that will work to help guide home schoolers as well.

    • Those last two are for all grade levels!

    Build Your Own Lego Robot

    How about an alternative project?

    Did you know that you can build robots with legos? They're even programmable.

    This intensely cute little girl (my daughter Leilani) won last year's science fair by making fruit batteries. She and her older brother, Manuha, compared voltage produced by putting a penny and a nail in various fruits. (Yes, it just automatically produces electricity.)

    Leilani and Sam

    Oh, Leilani's the one on the right smiley.

  • Need help on how to teach the scientific method for kids? I want to give credit to Ellen Booth Church, whose page on teaching the scientific method is awesome, simple, and will help you come up with your own ideas!
  • Some more great experiments are at the Fermilabs government page. Fermilabs is a laboratory that specializes in high-energy particle physics, but they seem to have paused to give our kids science lessons! Neat!
  • A reader referred me to this interesting description and history of the scientific method. It has some great instructional methods and examples of well-done experiments. Excellent page.

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"I have been a biologist for a long time, and I hope I never stop getting shivers in my spine when I think about the beauty of how we come to know things in biology.
Biologists make predictions, then they go out into the field or the lab to see if their predictions hold up. When hundreds of predictions of this sort are fulfilled, a theory reaches the point where it becomes certain, at least on a broad level. And that is where we are with evolution."
– Falk, Darrel. Professor of Biology. Point Loma Nazarene University. California.

If beautiful objects had been created solely for man's gratification, it ought to be shown that before man appeared, there was less beauty on the face of the earth … Flowers rank amongst the most beautiful productions of nature; but they have been rendered conspicuous … so that they may be easily observed by insects.

I have come to this conclusion from finding it an invariable rule that when a flower is fertilized by the wind it never has a gaily-coloured corolla. … Hence we may conclude that, if insects had not been developed on the face of the earth, our plants would not have been decked with beautiful flowers.

– Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, ch. 6

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There is something outrageous about such a huge body of evidence being put together, then being confirmed in all kinds of other scientific disciplines, particularly genetics, and having other people just sort of deny it for reasons that have nothing to do with truth.
– Matthew Chapman, Darwin's great-great-grandson, from the movie:

Great home school video with reenactments of the Dover trial on Intelligent Design.

I was always a writer.

Here's how I became a writer that's read.

Paul Pavao and daughter Leilani

Me with my daughter, Leilani