Printable scientific method worksheet

A prediction written after the result is not a prediction, and a child who fills this sheet in at the end of an experiment has done the whole thing backwards without noticing. The numbers are what stop that: they are on the boxes rather than in an instruction, so an empty box three under a filled-in box five is visible from across the table. Fill in the first three, put the pencil down, then do the experiment.

The third box asks what will happen *and why*, and the "why" is the hypothesis. A guess is "the big one will fall faster"; a hypothesis is "the big one will fall faster because it is heavier" — and the second one can be shown to be wrong in a way that teaches something, which is exactly what happens when both hit the floor together. This is the sheet to carry through an experiment; the lab report next door is the one to write it up on afterwards.

Every rule, every box and every cut line on the page above is drawn as ink rather than as a background color, which is why it comes out of the printer looking like it does on screen: browsers throw background paint away unless somebody has ticked Background graphics, and a page of cut guides that printed invisibly is a page somebody cuts freehand. The lengths are in inches for a plainer reason still — a card that says it is three and three quarter inches wide is going to be measured, and a die that is not square does not fold up. The number in the footer is the seed the sheet was built from, so the identical sheet can be had again next term.

This page is one sheet out of four families that between them print the forms, the week, the paper that gets cut up and the two things that are objects rather than pages. How many rows a chart has, how many cards there are to a page, how much room each answer gets, which verse is on it and whether a tag folds are all settings — so a chore chart with six rows, or a dated calendar for next March, is the same sheet with one control moved rather than a page somebody has to have written first.

The settings travel in the link rather than on a server, so a sheet you make can be bookmarked or sent to another family as it stands — and the Name: line, where a sheet has one, is printed blank, because there is nowhere in a shared link to put a child’s name. See what we don’t collect.