Teaching Kids Consistency in the Scientific Process

Today we are teaching kids consistency in the scientific process. In developing this character development series, I find object lessons extremely helpful. The lesson here shows the value of consistency. The goal is to help kids recognize that creating a uniformity in the process yields positive results.

If you are new to my character development series, let me tell you a little bit more about these lessons. If you check out my character development tab, you will discover 52 character traits we work on throughout the year, which equals one word per week to focus on with your kids.

Hovering over the tab will reveal all of the words. Each character trait has 7-9 lessons, so if you wanted to work on character daily, this can be an amazing resource.

This year, I want to focus on cleaning up my series by presenting the lessons to you be compiling all of my lessons on a particular week, this week focusing on consistency. In this series, you will find a word, definition, scripture to memorize, book lists and a number of activities and crafts related to the topic.

I hope you are inspired to work on character with your kids because being intentional in your parenting will help give great direction to both you and your children.

If you are on the week that focuses on consistency, I hope you have found my other consistency lessons.

Teaching Kids Consistency in the Scientific Process

As we have been doing consistently (did you catch that?), work on this Bible verse with your kids:

This kid friendly science experiment focuses on trying to make a car speed along on 3 different surfaces: kitchen floor, oriental rug and carpet.

Originally, I was just going to use one of those little self propelled cars that you pull back on.

My husband was convinced that those are not very consistent in the way they drive.

He suddenly became very into making sure our process was really accurate. That’s why he was invited to the party. I was just going to wing it to get the main idea across. He took it to the next level.

He came up with the idea of rigging a hanger with a rubber band strung across it. The rubber band had a little knot on the end you could pull back on.

He also had a ruler and would pull the rubber band to the same exact spot each time.

We talked to the kids about having only one variable at a time and the importance of being very consistent with the rest.

They wanted to bring in other cars, but we talked about how that wouldn’t keep it consistent. We showed how you had to pull back to the same spot each time. Then we talked about using the same tool for measuring. We also did the process on each surface 3 times to get 3 measurements. This insured we were being consistent with our process.

The first run was  done on the kitchen floor. We originally tried the little red car, but it wasn’t rolling consistently.

We then switched to the black Mega Blocks car. It worked well. We stuck with the black for the rest of the experiment. Again, we pulled the rubber band back to the same spot each time and let go. It went an average of 90 inches on the kitchen floor.

The second attempt was done on the oriental rug. We kept everything consistent, but the variable was obviously the rug surface. It went an average of 36 inches.