9th Grade Science Activities

As your students transition from eighth grade to ninth grade, they are expected to learn a lot more about science. In high school, students often will begin to branch off and learn specifically about chemistry, physics and earth science for entire semesters or for the entire year. To help students with this concentrated burst of science, you should make your ninth grade activities entertaining and interesting to make the learning really stick.

Periodic Table Bingo

Throughout high school, students will be expected to know more and more of the Periodic Table of Elements. One fun way to begin driving home that information is to play the Periodic Table of Elements game. You will need to create unique handouts for each of your students with different names of elements on each of the squares of a 5-by-5 bingo game board. Students can rip up pieces of scrap paper to use as game pieces. As the bingo number caller, you will call out the elemental number of the number you select. The students have 10 to 20 seconds to either remember or look up the element associated with that number to determine if they have that element. The first player to get five in a row wins. The next time you play, try not allowing your students to look up the table.

Roller Coaster Physics

For this activity, you can either use computer research or you can use the Amusement Park Physics Activity found on the Learner page. This interactive activity allows you to use the site to create your own roller coaster. If you wish to do an activity without the computer, you can simply have your students research roller coasters and create a coaster from scratch. This activity is a prime opportunity to demonstrate how roller coasters utilize the laws of physics to make riders feel like they're in danger. Depending on how much time you are able to devote, you can have your students create a three-dimensional roller coaster model in or outside of class.

Stigma of Disease

Print out several of the stories on the Stories from the Front page on the Lehman College website. These stories are written by teenage students who have suffered from horrible diseases like cancer and AIDS. There is a major stigma applied to people who have endured these hardships, and this activity can teach your students that these teenagers are just like them. By learning and understanding their stories, they can better understand how disease affects a person, a family and a lifetime.

Frozen Hot Water

This experiment allows your ninth graders to form a hypothesis and carry out a simple procedure. Students will determine which temperature of water freezes more quickly: hot water or cold water. Due to a law called the Mpemba effect, the hot water can actually freeze first in certain conditions. Carry out the experiment and have your students take lab notes throughout the process. Before even mentioning the Mpemba effect, see if your students can make a hypothesis as to why the warmer water would freeze more quickly. This is a great activity to show that science is not always obvious and that even something as seemingly simple as water can be tricky.