Summer is winding down, and that means Back to School Season is gearing up! Here at Buncee, we’d like to celebrate by bringing you ideas and inspiration on ways you can enhance your science lessons with Buncee!
Science and Technology are such an integral part of our everyday lives. In this day and age, it is more important than ever for the younger generation to garner an interest in STEM subjects, and become strong science students. Buncee is an excellent tool for getting students interested in learning about science. Here are 10 ideas to help get your school year started off on the right foot with Buncee.
Idea #1: Create Buncee Study Guides
Our first idea is to use Buncee to make study guides. This is a fun activity to work on together as a class; start by brainstorming a list of the key parts of the chapter or unit that you’ve just completed. Then, give your students the class period to make a Buncee to help them study the points that you discussed. They can use the stickers and animations to create visual metaphors and mnemonic devices to help them remember core concepts and vocabulary terms. Visual notes are easier to look over, the learning is stickier, and they’ll be able to access them easily at home.
Then once your students have created Buncee Study Guides, have them share to a Buncee board and leave comments. Here, students can comment on each other’s work, point out information that their classmates have forgotten, and check to find information that they need to beef up. It also gives you the last chance to give feedback to your students as they’re wrapping up the review before the test.
Idea #2: Create a Virtual Field Trip
Field Trips can be costly, and there’s only so many places you can really take your students. So why not try a Buncee Virtual Field Trip? With our extensive collection of 360 images, web images, youtube, and more to choose from, you can take your students on field trips around the world, without leaving the classroom! Simply select a 360 image, and set it as a background in Buncee, and you and your students are ready to go! You could also make it a whirlwind, “around the world” field trip. Have them create their own Buncees with a 360 image of a different location, and attach a QR code. Then have them print out the QR code, cut it out, and hang them around your classroom, or on a map of the world. Then, have your students scan the different QR codes, and they’ll be taken to each others Buncees where they can explore a 360 image! Virtual field trips are a great way for students to learn about a particular area, and feel as if they’ve traveled there themselves!
Idea #3: Create a STEM Portfolio
Buncee is the perfect place to create, display, and share a STEM portfolio that highlights your students’ best work. Buncee is a great way for older students, especially those who are interested in a career in STEM, to start building a portfolio that they can use for an internship, college, or even a job. Creating a portfolio in Buncee allows students to upload a broad range of media, including text, PDFs, and JPEGs, so they can present samples of their work, such as a lab report, or pictures of themselves doing fieldwork. This is ideal for creatively sharing your experience with a College Admissions Counselor, or even a Potential Employer.
Idea #4: Create an Interactive and Visual Research Presentation
Buncee makes creating a research presentation easy; so as a side project to any unit, you can allow students to take a deeper dive into related topics. For example, if you’re studying plants, perhaps they’ll research botany, plant diseases, farming, or care of a houseplant. This gives students time to practice their research skills, and Buncee provides the perfect place for students to report on what they’ve learned.
Idea #5: Create Interactive Practice Tests and Quizzes
A fun exercise you can do with Buncee is to have your students make their own pop quizzes. When students become the teachers, their learning solidifies. Have students use Buncee’s Multiple Choice or Free Response Questions to create quizzes about the day’s science lesson. They can share them on a Buncee Board, and take each other’s quizzes. You can even have them vote on which one is the best by using the comments feature. You could then take your students’ best quizzes from throughout the science unit, and use Clip and Stitch to put them together into your own Buncee. Now you’ve got a perfect practice test to assign to your class!
Idea #6: Create a Science Vocabulary Journal
Have your students create a science vocabulary journal. Making Buncees of their vocabulary words is more engaging and more memorable than writing them on lined paper, or matching words to definitions on a worksheet. The act of picking images to go with words and ideas is active learning, and your students will benefit from it! As a bonus – when it comes time to study, your students will have access to their notes anywhere they have internet. There’s no more, “I left my notes/journal at school/home.”
Idea #7: Create a Student Science Journal
Similarly, you could have your students create their own Student Science Journals, where they take notes on what they learned in that lesson. How many times a day do students around the world finish a lesson up with a worksheet or review questions from the book? We all know that this isn’t the most fun way for kids to review. Get them creating, and you’ll see a more authentic representation of what they’ve learned, and you’ll see better test scores!
Idea #8: Create Diagrams of Science Concepts and Anchor Charts
Sometimes there’s one piece of a lesson, chapter, or unit that’s really challenging, or maybe it’s just the biggest key to understanding. Using Buncee, instruct your students to create diagrams of science concepts, and use them as anchor charts! They can be stored on a Buncee Board, or printed up on a bulletin board to support student learning.
Idea #9: Interactive Science Reports
Whether you’re studying volcanoes or learning about chemical reactions, science experiments can be a lot of fun; one of my favorite memories from science class was learning how to make ice cream! But when it comes to doing the actual reporting part of the experiment, most students drag their heels. Instead of a traditional ‘poster board’ science project, why not try a Buncee science experiment journal? Use Buncee’s Educational Template Backgrounds with your students to create a journal for working their way through their next experiment or investigation. Let’s make reporting on the experiment as much fun as performing it!
Idea #10: Practice Classification and Comparisons
It is easy to practice classification and comparison with Buncee. Use a graphic organizer from Buncee’s backgrounds, or design your own, and have students create charts to classify animals, states of matter, or anything else that you’re studying in your class! Buncee’s immense sticker library, as well as its access to safe-search based web images through Pixabay, will allow your students to populate whatever chart they’re working on easily!
These are just some of the ways in which you can use Buncee to enhance your science lessons. Did we miss any? If you have an idea for a science lesson using Buncee, be sure to tweet it at us @Buncee, and share it on our FB educator’s group page. As you begin to prepare for your students, all of us at Buncee wish you the best of luck with the upcoming school year!
