One of my favorite units of study is Fossils!  The kids love doing hands-on labs and these are a lot of fun.  In this one, students use a packing peanut and some wooden toothpicks to make a creature.  The place their creature into the container of sand and then add water.  We leave them for a few minutes and SURPRISE...the packing peanut (soft parts of the creature) dissolves away leaving the wooden toothpicks (the hard parts of the creature) not like they looked before (thanks to settling of the water and sand).  Students also need to know that in the real world, this process takes a LONG time.

This lab is one of my favorites.  Grab it here for just $2!

If you teach fossils, this is a great lab to do with your students!  Check out my store for even more fun fossil activities!

For our School-wide January STEM Challenge, we focused on Penguins!  The kids had so much fun with this one, with grades K-5 participating!  Click here to buy the Penguin Pack!

Students had to make a penguin that was as "life-size" as possible.  The pack contains information sheets for each of the 17 types of penguins that includes measurements as well as background information.  Once the penguin was finished, students wrote a short report about the penguin using the information card and their own research.

 

Students were able to work individually or as a pair.  We also used the book, Penguins, by Gail Gibbons while we completed the challenge.  The penguins were pretty challenging to create.  Students had to measure the height of the penguin and then make everything proportional to the height as they drew it.

It make a great display!

We are reading, The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan, one of my favorite novels to do with upper elementary kids.  The book has a ton of information about the people and creatures in Greek mythology.  While reading the book, we are going to work on some mythology-inspired challenges, like column construction!

Here is our display after the challenge!  The kids got one sheet of copy paper and 2 index cards for this challenge.  They could also use scissors and tape.  Their goal was to build a paper column that could hold the most weight.

 

The kids had a lot of fun with this individual challenge!

On a side note--We got a FUJI Insta-Max camera with my Scholastic bonus points and the kids LOVE taking pictures of the different activities and labs we do in the classroom.  The film is reasonable and they love it!

Looking for Mythology Challenges?  Click here for the link to my pack on TPT!