• Bean plants can form the basis of a hands-on science lesson plan for children.Runner Bean Plants image by chrisharvey from Fotolia.com
  
  Although any teacher can stand up in front of a class of children and lecture about a science topic, teachers can motivate their students to learn more intensely when they create hands-on lesson plans that enable students to interact more thoroughly with the material. Hands-on science lesson plans should help students to make sense of the world around them.
  
  

Bean Plant Experiments

• Bean plant experiments are one of the most basic lesson plans for children, and there is so much you can do with them. The basic process consists of lining a foam cup with a wet paper towel and sliding dried beans between the two. If the cup is put in a sunny area, most of the beans will sprout and grow. Students can learn to chart the growth of the plants, examine the impact of sunlight or water on the plant, or diagram the parts of the bean seed and the resulting plant.
  
  

Floating and Sinking

• Very young children will love to explore the concept of buoyancy in more depth than the typical bathtub play allows. Make a pile of objects that can go in the water, such as a foam cup, a penny, a rock, a feather, a slip of paper, and a plastic fork. Ask students to identify which objects they think will float in water and which ones they think will sink, and allow students to test their guesses with a large basin of water. You can then add salt to the basin of water and see how that affects which items will sink and which items will float.
  
  

Testing a Hypothesis

• One of the most basic science concepts that young children need to understand is the process of coming up with a hypothesis, or educated guess, and testing it. One fun way to help them come up with their own hypotheses is by teaching them how to measure heart rate by taking a pulse. They can then make up their own hypotheses about heart rates and test them in small groups. A simple hypothesis might be that a person's heart rate will go up after physical activity. A more complex hypothesis might be that a person's heart rate will take longer to go down after a long period of physical activity than after a short period of physical activity. Students may also hypothesize about the connection between resting heart rate and various characteristics of a person, or between caffeine consumption and heart rate.