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Science Fair Project

Project Guide: General Steps

This guide will help you steer your students through the process of coming up with a good question to investigate for an Earth science fair project, designing a way to test that question, and creating a display to share findings and conclusions. The process begins with each student deciding on what he or she finds really interesting in the natural world. Use the navigation bar, above to navigate your way through each step.

Investigations

This part of the site contains sets of hands-on investigations for a number of Earth science topics. You can be part of the development process for the investigations. In fact, we want feedback from you. Try these investigations out and let us know how they worked for you and what changes or additions you would recommend. Send us your comments by emailing us at education@americangeosciences.org.

Literacy Strategies

In this section you will find strategies that will help your students to comprehend science texts and other written materials dealing with science content. These strategies can be used by teachers in every content area to support literacy instruction. There are 11 strategies in this section. Use the open (+) and close (-) to view the strategies below.

Revisit the Concepts of Weather

Linking to Weather

Explain to the students that weather describes their surroundings for a short time. Their journals will serve as an excellent record of weather conditions for a given interval of time. Climate, on the other hand, describes a more established pattern of weather conditions. Climate is the long-term average of weather. It is observed over many years and many seasons. The two most important factors in describing the climate of an area are temperature and precipitation.

How can you tell the speed of the wind?

Teaching and Learning Focus

In this investigation, your students will begin to develop their concept of how the interaction of moving air (wind) and water can affect heat transfer:

  • Water will evaporate more quickly when air is moving rapidly over its surface.
  • When water evaporates from a surface (such as your hand), heat is also removed from that surface.

Materials Needed

For each student pair:

Revisit the Concept of Clouds

Linking to Weather

After helping your students to understand the nature and composition of clouds, you can make a smooth transition to a discussion of precipitation. A thorough understanding of the physical conditions favoring various forms of precipitation is probably beyond the scope of the elementary science curriculum, but what they investigate here will provide some building blocks for this to happen at a later stage.

Here are some questions for your students to consider (with explanations in italics):

How can clouds form?

Teaching and Learning Focus

In this investigation, your students will begin to develop their concept of clouds based upon three basic observations:

  • Warm air can contain more water vapor than cold air.
  • When air loses heat, some of the water in the air turns to liquid.
  • As air loses heat, droplets of water collect and become visible on solid surfaces.

Materials Needed

For each student group:

How can we see if water is in the air?

Teaching and Learning Focus

In this investigation, your students will begin to develop their concept of clouds based upon three basic observations:

  • Warm air can contain more water vapor than cold air.
  • When air loses heat, some of the water in the air turns to liquid.
  • As air loses heat, droplets of water collect and become visible on solid surfaces.

Materials Needed

For the class:

  • Foam bucket of ice cubes and water

For each student group:

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