It can be hard to keep candy out of your classroom on Halloween. A new pumpkin grows out of the decay of the old one within a couple of weeks! Then, depending on what climate you live in, you can plant the pumpkins outside and potentially see new growth from them in the spring.Ĭreepy Chemistry 10. Sometimes we forget that STEM isn’t just about design and building: growing things is a form of scientific engineering as well! Germinating pumpkins inside of miniature pumpkins is a very easy activity that can teach your students about seeds, soil, and caring for plants, as well as about the circle of organic life. You can get creative with the materials, using boxes, paper clips, rubber bands, and other household items or recyclables. The challenge works well with miniature pumpkins, but there’s no reason you couldn’t use smaller ones of the traditional variety. Students in third grade and above are ready to tackle this in-depth engineering project of designing and building pumpkin elevators. Best of all, they can take their catapults home to be used in a huge variety of play, such as shooting acorns outside or making Lego figures soar over newly-built castles. With ping-pong balls for pumpkins and Legos or other building blocks for the “gate,” this challenge is safe and achievable for even the youngest students.Ĭonstructing candy pumpkin catapults offers a slightly more advanced (and entirely more edible) STEM challenge that is still accessible for the youngest elementary school students. The popular Halloween rhyme “ Five Little Pumpkins” has been made into songs, videos, and books – your pre-k, kindergarten, first, and second grade students may already know it! This rhyme also contains the inspiration for an easy STEM challenge: building a “gate” on which the round, rolling pumpkins can sit. Of course, after the initial investigation, the class can carve the pumpkin together and roast the seeds for a full afternoon of Halloween fun. Introduce the basics of scientific observation to your younger learners with this simple pumpkin investigation, which even includes a simple experiment testing whether your pumpkin sinks or floats. Once made, these simple toys are more than fun Halloween fidgeting tools: they accurately convey how muscles and tendons move muscles within the human body. Your students can play with skeletons in a biology or engineering class by making these paper, straw, and string articulated hands. These components aren’t just inexpensive: they’re able to produce a tremendous variety of structures, which means you can reward a variety of your students’ achievements, such as the strongest bridge, the most flexible bridge, and the bridge that can hold the most candy. lift –– as well as bat biology.īuilding a “bone” bridge out of q-tips, pipe cleaners, and clothespins offers your older students an in-depth, Halloween-themed structural engineering challenge that feels like holiday fun. But what about paper bats? Getting a heavier, less streamlined body to stay in the air offers your students a whole different engineering challenge, giving your class a chance to explore concepts like aerodynamics and weight vs. You’ve probably seen your students fly plenty of paper airplanes (with or without your permission). Encourage them to be inventive: no two spider webs in nature are the same, so their webs shouldn’t be the same either! It gives you a chance to talk about these remarkable animals, their silk, and geometrical webs before your students get a chance to create their own designs. Similarly, making spider webs out of yarn is more than a fun art activity to do during Halloween. Spiders may be creepy crawlies, but they are also master engineers. Several involve apples or pumpkins, which you can always incorporate into your lesson plans around Thanksgiving. If your school doesn’t celebrate Halloween, don’t worry – many of these activities work well in class apart from that holiday. You can find even more ideas on our Pinterest board. We’ve curated this list of Halloween-themed STEM activities to give you some easy and productive ways to make the holiday part of your curriculum, whether you’re teaching preschool, kindergarten, third, or even eighth grade. Of course, the best way to keep your students focused and learning during the lead up to trick-or-treat is to bring Halloween into the classroom. It’s hard for kids to contain their excitement as Halloween approaches.
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