Developing a lesson plan for science fair project units is easy to do. To start with you need to focus on a specific skill that is used for science fair project development. In this lesson plan you will be focusing on the utilization of scientific questions to come up with a topic for a project. This is one of the first lesson plans that you will need to develop for your science fair project module.
Goals and Objectives
Every lesson plan needs to start out by identifying the goals and objectives for the lesson plan. In this case the goals and objectives will be to introduce the concepts of scientific questions and project topics. After completing this lesson plan students will be able to come up with their own scientific questions and they will also be able to use their questions to select a topic for their own science fair project.
Introductory Information
At the beginning of your scientific question lesson you will need to introduce them of asking scientific questions. This can be done by first playing a round of 20 questions. This game is a great primer for what the students will be doing to find a topic for their science fair project. After playing the game of 20 questions you can talk about how scientists use questions to identify what needs to be researched or what angles you can take to find solutions to a scientific problem. Make sure you provide specific examples of scientists and the questions that they asked.
Guided Study
The next step is complete a guided study project. This activity will involve a series of 5 minute brainstorming sessions where students will be asked to come up with s many scientific questions as possible about a topic that you give them. For example, you may give your students the topic of renewable energy and have them brainstorm questions about this topic for five minutes. After each session you will write down the questions on the board to show how many different questions can be developed for one topic.
Homework Activity
For homework, you will ask each student to select a topic and to come up with 15 to 20 questions about that topic. These questions will be used to come up with a topic for the student’s science fair project in a later lesson.