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What are some fun STEM ideas to have outdoors in the Winter Season??
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Hi Nora! I am a preservice teacher at WSU and some fun STEM ideas would be having the students work in groups to build a mini sled for outside and they can even attempt to make a slope as well, using snow to make habitats for specific animals you're learning about for younger primary grades, snowball launcher, the blubber experiment to teacher students about how animals stay warm in the winter, creating an out door measuring kit to track the snowfall throughout the season!
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Hey Nora! I am a pre-service teacher from Wartburg College. A fun activity I rememeber doing when I was going through K-12 was a frozen bubble experiment. It covers both physics and tempertature effect concepts.
The activity is as follows... On a day below freezing, blow bubbles and watch them freeze and formfrost patterns. After that, discuss how the temperature affects the liquid turning to solid and why the bubbles freeze before popping.
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Hey Nora, I am a preservice teacher at Wartburg College. I think a fun general classroom activity you could do during the winter season, specifically for elementary school would include having students design their own snowflakes to hang up around the room or have them create anything that could be hung up around the room. A deeper activity you could have students participate in could be a DIY thermometer. Using straws, food coloring, and water, students can create thermometers to show temperature changes and measure them both indoors and outdoors. Finally, you could do a short unit on different animal tracks in the snow. Hope this helps!
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Hi Nora!
An experiment I found was making ice cream with ice and salt. Here is the link https://www.sciencebuddies.org/stem-activities/ice-cream-bag. This experiment demonstrates the science behind freezing point depression, where salt causes ice to melt at a lower temperature, allowing the cream to freeze. It relates to STEM connecting real-world chemistry on how salt affects ice, physics with energy transfer through shaking, and engineering with designing the bags to hold the ingredients. The process of liquid turning into solid ice cream also illustrates phase changes, which are key concepts in science. By conducting this experiment, students explore how science can be applied to everyday activities like making ice cream. This would be fun to do in the winter to incorporate the outside temperature or you could use the snow outside to freeze the ice cream in the experiment. You can make this experiment fun and relevant for any age!
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