Fifth grade students should expect to carry out more complex scientific experiments and innovations, while learning project planning skills they will need for adulthood.
Discover Earth science through classic volcano experiments or examine how acid rain impacts plant growth with this environmental sciences demonstration. Kids can also use wood craft sticks to construct a newspaper airplane and learn more about gravity and density by making their own newspaper plane out of wood craft sticks.
Volcano
When we hear “volcano,” images of cone-shaped hills and mountains come to mind; however, there are actually numerous types of volcanoes on earth.
Volcanoes come in all forms. From those that erupt regularly to dormant or extinct forms. Others still serve as lava fields – like those on Jupiter’s moon Io – or geysers which blast boiling water high into the sky.
Put your students’ engineering abilities to the test with this exciting science fair project! This straightforward experiment shows them how to separate colors using chromatography.
Orange Plates
Setting out on a science fair project is an exhilarating experience for 5th graders to explore scientific concepts. Help them choose an idea that will fulfill their natural curiosity while deepening their understanding of the world around them.
Encourage the use of vibrant visuals to draw people’s attention and explain an experiment’s findings, providing additional materials like charts, graphs and photos to adorn display boards.
Eggshell Arches
Eggshell Arch can be found just an hour southeast of Page, Arizona in Ts’ah Bii Kin Canyon on Navajo land and serves as an outstanding example of force distribution on an arch structure.
Students can test how various shapes affect the time it takes for pasta to cook, exploring geometry concepts. Furthermore, they can experiment with how various salt concentrations impact water freezing and melting points while learning about states of matter.
Airplane
By fifth grade, students should assume more responsibility in designing and conducting their own experiments. Generating meaningful science fair projects also provides invaluable practice in research and communication skills.
Students can explore how lighting affects plant growth or test out various materials’ insulating properties, or conduct experiments on how various household chemicals repel insects.
Other fun projects to try include investigating how much weight a trampoline can support, writing secret messages with invisible ink and then using water to reveal them, or building a tower from newspaper in order to explore states of matter.
Hydrophobic Sand
Hydrophobic or “magic sand,” as it’s more commonly known, is sand that has been treated with hydrophobic compounds to make it waterproof and dirtproof – used both commercially and domestically for cleaning up oil spills. While commonly sold as toys for children to play with and commercially for industrial uses such as spill cleanup.
A great science experiment to demonstrate static electricity. Have students rub a balloon before holding it over butterfly wings. Watch how their wings move towards the balloon!
Students can gain an understanding of the states of matter by exploring water vapor and bubbles with this project. Furthermore, it helps them comprehend how heat transfers through liquids.
Bouncy Balls
This engaging STEM challenge helps children explore gravity and density concepts like gravity. By tossing different objects and measuring how far they bounced back to you, children gain invaluable experience making predictions, testing variables, recording data and drawing conclusions.
Ping-pong balls and rubber toys owe their buoyant qualities to their elasticity – the ability of materials to spring back to their original shapes after being stretched or squeezed – thus producing their unique bouncy properties. This experiment shows how different objects have different levels of elasticity.
Lightning Storm
Science fair projects allow students to explore scientific topics of their choosing and participate in hands-on learning experiences while developing research, problem-solving, communication and creative thinking skills.
Lightning is an electrical discharge which descends upon Earth from a thunderstorm cumulonimbus cloud, caused by negative charges (like electrons) being attracted by positive charges on either the ground or an aluminum pie pan used as part of this experiment. Lightning strikes when negative charges ( like electrons in your fingertips or at the base of a cloud) attract positive charges like protons on either surface (like soil or an aluminum pie pan used here).
Bacteria Colony
While bacteria is often thought of as harmful, they’re an integral component of life on earth and this project seeks to show their beneficial impacts with an easy experiment that anyone can conduct at home.
Students collect saliva using cotton swabs and test for the presence of bacteria colonies using different Petri dishes. Students can also explore how temperature impacts bacterial growth rates as well as explore how various ingredients such as sugar, vinegar, baking soda and salt affect plant wilting rates.
Newspaper Tower
Build teamwork and communication skills through this engineering challenge! Have student groups collaborate in designing and constructing towers from newspaper and tape rolls in order to find the tallest structure. This project encourages them to consider real-life building constraints such as limited materials and economic costs when planning their tower designs and constructitons.
Help kids understand how germs spread with this hands-on experiment! Kids swab both their own hands and those of their peers before cultivating and counting bacterial colonies present in each sample.