Teacher Resources

As part of its effort to help strengthen science education, Science Buddies provides a number of teacher resources. These tools may also be of interest to many parents:

Planning a Science Fair

• Teacher's Guide to Science Projects is designed to help teachers prepare, organize, and manage a science project program in the classroom.
• A Guide to Planning a Science Fair is an invaluable step-by-step guide loaded with tools, tips, and tricks for those teachers who want to offer their students the benefits of a full science fair event.
• The Science Fair Schedule Worksheet will help you plan and schedule science fair assignments.
• Printable copies of our Science Fair Project Guide webpages are perfect handouts for students.
• The Science Fair Project Grading Rubrics consist of teacher-vetted rubrics for each step of a science fair project from grading the question to evaluating the display board.

Science in the Classroom

• Science Project Enrichment Tools are tried-and-true methods from teachers and other dependable resources that will help your students reap the full benefits from their science fair projects.
• Our Scientific Method classroom poster is also available in PDF format.

Valuable Resources for Students, Educators, & Parents

• New! Family Online Safety Guide One of Science Buddies' key sponsors, Symantec and the Symantec Foundation, has created this excellent resource for educators and parents, providing safety tips and information about various Internet issues in relation to children, tweens, and teens.
• Sign up for the Science Buddies Quarterly Newsletter and be the first to hear about great new project ideas, teacher resources, changes to our website, and much more!
• The Topic Selection Wizard is an interactive questionnaire to help science fair participants narrow their area of interest.
• Ask an Expert is an online bulletin board you and/or students can use to ask science fair and/or career-oriented questions of our volunteer advisors, all of whom are professional scientists or engineers.
• Presenting Science Buddies to Others consists of PowerPoint presentations showing the vast resources available on the Science Buddies website.

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A Word About Permissions

Individuals may download material on this page for their own use. If you are a teacher, you may download material on this page and make copies for classroom use at your school only. You may freely distribute it on paper to your students, parents, and mentors, if any. You may NOT post these materials on the Web or republish them in any form. We encourage you to tell other schools about the material, but we request that they download the information themselves. All other rights are reserved by Science Buddies.

We Ask that Downloaders Please Send Us an Email

To help us improve our material, we ask that you send us an email after you have used our downloads or directed a class to use the Topic Selection Wizard. We have a strict privacy policy, and none of the information you provide will be given to third parties. In your email, please include:

1. Your name
2. The Science Buddies Resource(s) you used in your classroom
3. Any comments you have about how we might improve the material

Click here to send us an email: scibuddy@sciencebuddies.org
Thank you very much!

Teacher's Guide to Science Projects

The Teacher's Guide to Science Projects was developed to provide teachers with everything they need to assign, manage, and evaluate a science project program in the classroom, including lots of tips to make a science project a fun educational experience. While this guide was designed for teachers who have never assigned a science project, it also offers a variety of tools and tips that seasoned teachers will find useful. Some of the key elements included in the guide:

• Benefits of a Science Project: An explanation of the benefits of doing a science project and how they map to the science education standards.
• Teacher Timeline: Steps to help teachers guide students and plan additional activities.
• Safety Guidelines: How and when teachers should review student science projects for safety concerns.
• Student Science Project Schedule: A timeline for students to follow with reading and homework assignments.
• A Parent Guide to Science Projects: A letter introducing parents to the science project, plus tips on how to effectively help a student on a project.
• Printable Assignment Worksheets: for key steps of the science project

Download Teacher's Guide to Science Projects (pdf)

A Guide to Planning a Science Fair

Introducing the 2008 Science Buddies Guide to Planning a Science Fair!

Planning your school's science fair? New to the process or just looking for a more organized approach? We've developed the documents below to help you put on a successful science fair, from start to finish. The documents go hand in hand and offer many options that you can tailor to your school's fair.

Science Fair Schedule Worksheet

This worksheet is a handy tool to help construct a schedule for science fair assignment due dates. In contrast to the timelines and schedules included in our Teacher's Guide to Science Projects, these worksheets are not tied directly to the resources in our online Science Project Guide and can be helpful for teachers who are planning a science project but might be using materials other than those provided on our website. It has three sections:

1. Holiday/Work Day Planner. This worksheet lets you summarize all your holidays and teacher workdays in one spot to assist in scheduling the science fair assignments. If you have a good school calendar handy, you can skip this step.
2. Science Fair Assignment Worksheet. This worksheet helps you plan when student assignments should be due.
3. Student/Parent Schedule. Transfer the dates from the worksheet to this schedule and you can distribute it to students and parents. We highly recommend that parents receive a copy of the schedule. You may also want to add a permission slip and/or notification of the student's project topic.

Download Science Fair Schedule Worksheet (Word doc): This document offers a more generic schedule which can easily be integrated with any science project resources.

Printable Copies of our Science Fair Project Guide Webpages

• The Scientific Method
  • Printable Scientific Method Handout This is a larger version of the image in the Scientific Method Project Guide section.
• Your Question
  • Project Proposal Form A form to accompany the Your Question Project Guide section, which provides for student and parent signatures, signifying commitment to the project.
• Background Research Plan
  • Background Research Plan Worksheet This worksheet is an excellent companion to the Background Research Plan Project Guide.
• Finding Information
• Bibliography
  • Bibliography Worksheet This worksheet is an excellent complement to the Finding Information or Bibliography Project Guide, helping students collect and organize all the information they need to do a proper bibliography.
• Research Paper
  • How to Format Your Research Paper A good summary if you want your students to use either the APA or the MLA standards.
• Variables
• Variables for Beginners
• Hypothesis
• Experimental Procedure
• Materials List
• Conducting an Experiment
  • Laboratory Notebook Complete information on how to do a laboratory notebook, with examples.
• Data Analysis & Graphs
  • Summarizing Your Data This is an in-depth handout to complement the Data Analysis & Graphs Project Guide section.
  • Variance & Standard Deviation A good supplement for advanced students.
• Conclusions
• Final Report
  • Final Report Checklist A handout to accompany the Final Report Project Guide section, helping students to remember everything to include.
• Abstract
• Display Board
• Science Fair Judging

Science Fair Project Grading Rubrics

Grading rubrics are an important component of the science project to ensure that all projects are graded fairly and on the same fundamental concepts. Science Buddies has developed a set of teacher-vetted rubrics in PDF format for each step of the science project as detailed on the Science Buddies website. The rubrics cover:

• The Question
• Bibliography
• Research Plan
• Research Paper
• Variables & Hypothesis
• Materials and Procedures
• Data Analysis & Graphs
• Conclusions
• Final Report
• Display Board

Science Project Enrichment Tools

Science Buddies wants you and your students to get the most out of the science fair project experience, and we're confident that these Science Project Enrichment Tools will help. Each tool features grade-level applicability, implementation instructions, and direct benefits for your students. Please visit each link, some of which include supplementary tools for you to download and print for use in your classroom.

• Family Science Night: Show students and their families that science is fun! By setting up several science activities for everyone in the family, parents will experience the type of hands-on, inquiry-based learning that their children are receiving. This tool also fosters interaction between parents, teachers, and students.
• Extra Credit: Boost science fair attendance by providing extra credit to students who bring a family member or mentor to the fair.
• Science Fair Information Night: This tool goes hand in hand with the Science Buddies Teacher's Guide to Science Projects. Hold a Science Fair Information Night for parents at your school and present this dynamic PowerPoint presentation, which explains the process, goals, parent-teacher involvement, and student benefits.
• In-Class Science Project: Employ scientific inquiry in your classroom by guiding students through a hands-on trial run of a single classroom science project before they tackle their own.
• Black Box: Give students assignments related to their science projects, grade them according to set rubrics, and then offer students the chance to improve at each step.
• Science Fair Passports: Organize a passport activity to increase fair attendance and encourage visiting students to enjoy learning from the fair, communicating with fair participants, and being inspired by their peers' projects.
• Peer Review: Have students interview each other about their science fair projects to help them build confidence, enhance presentation skills, and learn to evaluate and implement feedback.
• Project Clinic: Level the playing field for students who do not have access to knowledgeable mentors who can assist them in conceptualizing and completing their science projects.
• More, coming soon!

Scientific Method Classroom Poster

In partnership with Seagate Technology, Science Buddies has developed a 26"x36" classroom poster providing an overview of the six steps of the scientific method as described on the Science Buddies website. We have limited quantities of this poster available to teachers free of charge and there are no shipping and handling charges. Please allow 4-6 weeks for shipping.

We also have a PDF version of this poster available for anyone interested in printing their own copies. For student handouts, printing on legal-size paper (8.5 x 14 inches) works quite nicely.

Request a Free Poster

Download Scientific Method Poster (pdf)

Family Online Safety Guide New!

Children's online safety is not only a key focus area for Science Buddies, but also for one of our main sponsors, Symantec and the Symantec Foundation. For this reason, Symantec has generously offered to share this invaluable guide with you! It is packed with information about the benefits and risks of the Internet in relation to you, but most importantly, to your students and children. Highlights include:

• A set of non-invasive questions to open up the lines of communication between you and your students or children about their Internet usage.
• Tips for safely browsing the Internet.
• Information about blogging, downloading, and the social networking sites your students and children probably visit.
• Tips for safe online shopping, bill paying, and banking.

For additional information about online safety, visit Symantec's Family Resource Website, which provides easy-to-understand insights about Internet safety issues, with materials designed for educators, parents and grandparents, and law enforcement.

Download Family Online Safety Guide (pdf)

Topic Selection Wizard

You can access the Topic Selection Wizard from the Science Fair Project Question page. Try it!

Ask an Expert

You can access Ask an Expert from here, or by clicking on the Ask an Expert tab at the top of the page. Try it! We can help with student, teacher, or parent questions about science fairs or science fair projects.

Presenting Science Buddies to Others

If you have a need to present the Science Buddies resources to students, parents, or other teachers and you don't have a live Internet connection, you can use our PowerPoint presentation. This practical and powerful 3.9 MB PowerPoint file contains screenshots from our website and introduces the vast array of resources that Science Buddies has to offer. Highlights include the Topic Selection Wizard, Project Ideas, Project Guide, Ask an Expert, and Teacher Resources. Two presentations are provided. The "Junior Division" presentation targets students in grades K-6 and the "Senior Division" presentation targets students in grades 7-12.

• Download Science Buddies Presentation - Junior Division (ppt) New!
• Download Science Buddies Presentation - Senior Division (ppt) New!

If you would like a one-page flyer to give to students, send home to parents, pass out at a school open house, or post, you can use this general flyer. This 58 KB PDF file contains a brief description of all the tools and resources offered by Science Buddies. A few versions of this flyer are available that give recognition to sponsors who have underwritten support of Science Buddies for a specific region.

Download Science Buddies General Flyer (pdf)