Interactive Amplify Science lessons for elementary school.
Real classroom lesson ideas that sit in Interactive Amplify, with anti-examples to sharpen your placement.
By Andy Perryer, Director of Education Innovation4 lessonsReviewed September 2026
Interactive Amplify sits at the Interactive row and Amplify column of the PICRAT grid. Below: real Science lessons for elementary school (KS2, Years 3 to 6, ages 7 to 11) that sit in Interactive Amplify, plus anti-examples that look like it but sit elsewhere.
Grade 2 bean shoots in light and dark, charted daily in a shared Google Sheet
Grade 2 (Year 3, age 7 to 8)
· 150 min
· 1 device per pair
The teacher sprouts broad beans in damp kitchen roll beforehand, so every shoot is just showing on the first day. Each pair plants two, one on the windowsill and one in a dark cupboard, waters both the same, and over two weeks uses a daily 10-minute slot to measure each shoot in millimetres and enter it in its row of a shared class Google Sheet. The teacher has set up a line chart of the class average for light and dark beans that redraws as each reading goes in, and shows it at the start of each slot; when the dark beans pull ahead, usually within the first week, the teacher asks pairs to predict why before the class compares how the two sets of shoots look. In a final 50-minute lesson, pairs compare colour, leaf size and stem strength as well as height, and write a sentence explaining why the tallest shoots are not the healthiest.
Each pair gets a tray with a paperclip, a plastic spoon, an eraser, a brass key, an iron nail and a 1p coin, and the teacher has quietly given some trays a coin from before 1992 and others a newer one. Pairs test each object with a bar magnet, make two piles, and post one photo of each pile to the magnetic or non-magnetic column of a class Padlet. The teacher scrolls the columns on the board and stops at the 1p coins, which appear in both columns. Two pairs retest their coins at the front, and the class reads the dates to find that newer coins are copper-plated steel. Photos show the objects on the tray, with no faces or names.
Year 4 are investigating whether temperature changes how fast ice melts. The teacher prepares jugs of water at about 10°C, 20°C, 30°C and 40°C. Each pair pours 200 ml from one jug into a clear cup, reads its temperature with a thermometer, drops in one ice cube from the same tray and times it with a stopwatch until no ice is left; the pairs with the coldest water start first, because theirs takes longest. In a shared Google Sheet, opened on school accounts, pairs type their temperature and their time in seconds into a row named by table number, and a scatter chart on the board gains a dot for every result. The class watches the dots step downwards as the water gets warmer, and the teacher asks why the dots at one temperature do not sit on top of each other. Children suggest reasons, such as stirring or a bigger cube, and agree one rule to tighten the test. The class then uses the chart to predict the time at 25°C, three pairs test it under the new rule while the rest watch the dots land, and every child writes a conclusion using two results from the chart.
The teacher shows a box of books, a newton meter and a set of round dowels, and asks how much force it will take to pull the box across the table with and without the dowels underneath as rollers. Each pair posts a predicted reading for both pulls and a reason to a Padlet with three columns: more force with rollers, the same, and less force with rollers. The teacher reads out the reasons in each column, then runs both pulls with a pupil reading the meter aloud. Pairs finish by adding a comment to their own post saying what the readings showed and which part of their reason held up, and the teacher picks out any that mention friction between surfaces.