Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Science Fair, Elementary Grades

My ds9 is very interested in doing a project for the science fair in the late winter. He has proposed original experiments and talked about doing one or another famous experiments, chemistry, physics, etc.

Just curious if in general science fairs at this stage are usually ok with a child recreating a famous experiment --- I see lots of books of ideas for science fair projects, so I would assume recreation of experiments will be ok (?)
And I know this likely varies from school to school, I need to find out how much they are asking for in the 'unique and new' department. After typing this, I am thinking I need to make sure ds knows it's a learning opportunity and not a contest, but he is already asking about how to 'win'. Aaaaaah.

Yes, many students recreate experiments. I like science fair, even though it is tough. It teaches them to organize their data and information. My daughter always learned quite a bit.

Do kids usually do science fair as part of school? I have been thinking of this for my DS9 but have not investigated yet. Any suggestions for getting started?


It might be cool if my DS9 and DD6 could do it together. hmm!?

I looked at a couple of different county sites, our county starts at 4th grade, the 'fancier' nearby county starts at middle school. It is optional for children in elementary, I am not sure about higher up.

Otgm, like your ds6, my ds9 has been waiting for this since 1st grade, lol!~ not entirely sure the best way to start, other than have ds look at science fair project books and get the requirements/rules when they are put out. I thought they'd be available year-round to peruse, but so far have not located them. (yours may already be available!) I think they issue the rules/date in Dec. or so, and then the fair is a couple months later. I actually thought a few years ago they required kids to do a paper airplane project, because the only year we've gone to see it, most were 'what makes the best paper airplane'. A cool project, but less so after you've seen 20 of them...

Alternatively, have your DS come up with several questions he'd like to answer and see if he can develop a way of testing it or figuring out the answer. When my son did a project in 2nd grade, he wanted to know if hot water cools down to room temp at the same rate that cold water warms up to room temp. He designed the experiment and wrote a program in NXT-G, and using an thermometer with the NXT brick, he acquired the data, saved it to file, and DH helped him to graph it in Excel. It was a great experiment and my chemical engineer-FIL was impressed with the data. It perfectly illustrated an asymptote.

let us know how the science fair projects go.

I remember seeing a flyer at the library about it. I'm going to start there.

My son saw some things from mindware.com for science for xmas that might be something we could expand on. (I keep mentioning mindware.com here because I love their stuff. I wish I had a nickle for everytime I mentioned them. LOL)

When I was in elementary school (ages ago) science fair participation was mandatory for kids in the gifted program. At this age I replicated projects. In high school I used news issues to spark project ideas.