From some of the quirkiest minds inside the Little Scientists team come some personal insights into experiencing and exploring STEM in the world around you. With this collection of curious facts and observations, we aim to inspire you to find STEM in the everyday.
Impactful early experiences help to shape our personality and create personal life-long values. Cleaning your local stream, building a water purification system or investigating other ways to protect our environment in a child-led way, could be the spark to ignite the passion for sustainability in the environmentalists of tomorrow.
This playful activity is a wonderful way to extend the vocabulary of temperature. The idea that people experience temperature differently and that ‘hotness’ is not fixed is fascinating to children.
There are 17 species of penguin, ranging in height from 20-130cm tall. By measuring and recording heights, children learn skills important for scientific research. They also use criteria for classification and STEM language.
What do you know about tessellations and why do turtle shells form hexagons? My hypothesis is that hexagons have a larger surface area to smaller perimeter ratio. What is your hypothesis? What are the children’s?
Do dolphins and whales have ears? How do earthworms hear? Why are ears shaped the way they are? Would dolphins and whales create more drag if they had external ears? Does long hair make a difference when moving through water? This STEM activity examines these questions and much more.
The blue whale is the biggest animal that has ever lived (that we know of), bigger than an elephant and bigger than any of the dinosaurs we have found. This activity explores one of the reasons why it has been able to evolve to be SO BIG!
Find a cosy place to sit with the children and ask everyone to close their eyes. What can they hear? You will be surprised how many sounds the children notice when everybody is quiet. For many children, this might be the first time they consciously absorb the sounds around them and they might wonder, ‘Why have I never heard this sound before?’, ‘Can I ignore a sound if I decide to?’
In our modern world, the ability to encode content is becoming more and more essential. Modern-day technology has led to an unprecedented level of transparency. To ensure children’s safety, their ability to recognise a security risk and a skill set that helps them protect their privacy are invaluable. The first step to cyber safety is to understand the basics of keeping information safe.
The other day, we had a power outage for 12 hours. No big deal, right? Technology really does make life so much easier! On the flip side, the convenience of our modern lives comes at a cost.
There is a lot of STEM in cooking. In this activity, we are focussing on the chemistry of cooking by analysing the raising agents and how they work. It links very well to the red cabbage chemistry activity but can also be a stand-alone activity.