# National Science Week Activities for Primary Classrooms > Plan an unforgettable National Science Week with hands-on experiments, STEM lesson plans and printable resources for Foundation to Year 6 classrooms. ## National Science Week in Primary Classrooms National Science Week runs from 16 to 24 August every year, with primary classrooms tying their hands-on science block, weekly investigations and STEM rotations to the national theme that rotates annually. With over a decade of consistency behind it, Science Week has become one of the strongest school-engagement weeks of the year — second only to Book Week in many primary schools — and it is a brilliant opportunity to lift science off the page and into bins, trays, balloons, baking soda, mirrors and magnets. This guide collects planning resources, hands-on experiment kits, STEM lesson sequences and printable activity packs aligned to the Australian Curriculum v9 Science strand. Whether you are planning a single science-themed Friday or a full-week investigation rotation, the marketplace inventory below covers Foundation through to Year 6 with options that work in well-resourced art rooms and bare-bones portable classrooms alike. **Planning a Science Week that actually teaches science.** Schools sometimes treat Science Week as a kind of curriculum holiday — slime, lava lamps, a parent visit from someone who works at the CSIRO, and a parade of demonstrations. There is nothing wrong with any of that, but the strongest Science Weeks are also the most curriculum-aligned. They use the week to compress and accelerate inquiry skills the students are already developing, rather than abandoning the program for entertainment. Practically, that means choosing experiments that map to the strand you are already teaching, scaffolding the predict-test-observe-explain cycle on every activity, and building in time for student talk and writing about the science. A Year 4 class working on states of matter benefits enormously from a Science Week dedicated to changing-state experiments, with each student keeping a structured science journal across the week. By Friday, they have ten investigations, ten predictions, ten observations and ten explanations — that is a portfolio of evidence you can point to in their report. For Foundation and Year 1, the focus shifts. Teach the language of science explicitly — observe, predict, measure, compare, sort. Choose investigations that build vocabulary and curiosity rather than chasing dramatic visual outcomes. Sink-and-float trays, leaf-sorting walks, magnet exploration, and shadow tracing across the day all give five and six year olds rich language work and meaningful science learning. **Choosing experiments that work in your room.** The single biggest predictor of a successful Science Week is whether your experiments work in the room you actually have, with the materials you actually own. Beautiful Pinterest experiments that need a vacuum chamber, dry ice or a Bunsen burner are not options for most primary classrooms. The marketplace resources below have been written by classroom teachers, so the equipment lists are realistic — paper towels, food colouring, bicarb soda, vinegar, balloons, torches, magnifying glasses, plastic cups. If you have an interactive whiteboard, also lean into virtual experiments and time-lapse videos. Watching a seed germinate over seven days at one frame per hour is a more powerful teaching moment than most live experiments, and it costs nothing. **Build in cross-curricular writing and maths.** Science Week is a goldmine for integrated writing. Procedural writing — explaining how to perform an experiment, step by step — fits beautifully and gives you authentic context for the genre. Information reports on the science behind each experiment are another natural fit, especially for Year 3 to Year 6 students writing up their journal entries. For maths, the data handling outcomes get a workout. Tally marks of who predicted what, line graphs of plant growth across the week, bar charts of how many drops of water sat on a coin before the surface tension broke — every experiment is a maths task in disguise. Plan for it deliberately and you double the curriculum coverage of the week. **Whole-school events and parent engagement.** For schools running a whole-school Science Week, consider an evening expo where each class presents one investigation to parents in the hall. Allocate two weeks of preparation, give each year level a different inquiry strand, and finish the week with the public-facing event. Parents who sit through their child explaining surface tension or the colour-changing chemistry of red cabbage juice walk out with a much better picture of what their child can do than any report card delivers. **Browse the marketplace.** The carousels below pull together National Science Week-aligned resources, science experiment packs and STEM rotation activities from teachers across Australia. Filter by year level to match your class. For ongoing science teaching, see our [primary science activities guide](/teacher-guides/science-activities) and the [NSW Science Design Process for Stage 1-3](/teacher-guides/nsw-science-design-process-stage-1-3). For the broader school calendar, see [key education dates 2026](/teacher-guides/key-education-dates-2026). ## National Science Week Resources _(Dynamic listing feed — browse at the page URL for live results.)_ ## Hands-On Science Experiments F-6 _(Dynamic listing feed — browse at the page URL for live results.)_ ## Frequently Asked Questions ### When is National Science Week 2026? National Science Week 2026 runs from Saturday 16 August to Sunday 24 August. The school week most teachers focus their program on is Monday 17 August through Friday 21 August. The annual theme is announced each year by Inspiring Australia and shapes the suggested experiment focus for participating schools across the country. ### What science experiments work best for Foundation and Year 1 classrooms? Sink-and-float trays, leaf-sorting walks, magnet exploration, ice-melting investigations and shadow tracing across the school day work brilliantly with five and six year olds. The focus at this stage should be on building science vocabulary — observe, predict, measure, compare, sort — rather than chasing dramatic visual outcomes that older students might enjoy more in a Year 5 or Year 6 lesson. ### How do I align my Science Week program with the Australian Curriculum? Choose experiments that map to the science strand you are already teaching for that term, then scaffold the predict-test-observe-explain cycle on every activity. Build in structured journal writing across the week so each student has a portfolio of investigations, predictions and explanations by Friday. That portfolio doubles as an authentic assessment task for the unit and a strong piece of evidence at report time. ### Can I integrate writing and maths into Science Week activities? Absolutely — Science Week is a natural fit for procedural writing about how to run an experiment, and information reports on the underlying science. For maths, every experiment delivers data-handling work through tally marks, bar charts, line graphs and measurement tasks. Planning for these integrations doubles the curriculum coverage of the week without any extra time on your timetable. --- Source: https://teachbuysell.com.au/teacher-guides/national-science-week-classroom Marketplace: https://teachbuysell.com.au