Tips for Teaching About Electricity
to Elementary Students

While electricity is a highly accurate science, it contains so much technical information and terminology that it is not an easy science to understand. For the teacher, subjects that are hard to understand present a challenge in the classroom. Of course, many teachers feel they are not able to teach electricity well because they don’t completely understand it.

The following hands-on activities can help your students develop a better grasp of electricity terms:

• You can explain circuits with a lemon, a dime and a penny. Give each student a lemon. Have the roll it around on the table and shake it. Cut two small slits in each lemon, about one-half of an inch apart. Have students place the dime in one slit and the penny in the other. Then have students touch their tongues to the dime and the penny at the same time.
  
• • Be sure to wash the dimes and pennies before doing this experiment.
  • Make sure you are the one who cuts the slits in the lemon. It takes longer than having each student do their own, but it’s infinitely safer.
  • Students will feel a tingling on their tongue. Explain that one coin has a positive electric charge, and one has a negative electric charge (electrodes). The charges create an electric current in the lemon juice (electrolyte). The student’s tongue completes the circuit. The tingling feeling, and a slight metallic taste, are caused by electrons moving through the saliva on the tongue.
  • The lemon is a 0.7-volt voltaic battery, which means it converts chemical energy to electrical energy.
  • A twist on this project is to use a copper screw and a zinc screw, screwing them into the lemon about 1 inch apart. Strip the leads on a holiday light bulb, exposing the wires. Wrap one wire around each screw and watch it glow!

• If you want to explain electric fields created by electric currents, find a fluorescent lighting tube, a piece of plastic wrap, and pieces of wool, cotton, fake fur and other types of cloth. Turn off the lights. Hold the tube in one hand and rub it up and down with the plastic wrap. Ask the students to tell you what they see. Do this again with each of the types of materials.
• • Static electricity creates enough of an electrical field to excite the electrons in the fluorescent gas, making it glow.
  • Different materials will create different amounts of static electricity, causing different levels of glow in the light. Discuss with students what that means in regard to the electrons and the electrical field.

• Explain conductors and insulators using a light bulb. Hold different types of material, i.e. aluminum foil, a piece of plastic, a metal pan, a heavy jacket, in front of a light bulb. Let students feel the material to see if they can feel the heat from the light bulb. Let them find different materials to test. This will also work using a hair dryer or other heat source.

Find other activities that you can use to explain different concepts. Break electricity down into its various parts, and explain them in ways the students can understand. Most of all, make it fun and the students will want to learn.

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