Essential Labs give teachers flexible, standards-driven activities that reduce prep time and keep students engaged—all without purchasing a full curriculum.
Essential Labs are comprehensive, ready-to-use lab kits delivering hands-on and phenomena-driven instruction designed for flexibility, ease, and standards alignment. Over 80 activities spark curiosity in life science, physical science, and earth and space science and are available in 1-use and 4-use kits for varying class periods. Lab kits get straight to the point, each covering essential topics in just 1 or 2 class periods.
Students start with an overview, phenomenon, and an essential question, then dive into a teacher-tested activity.
Here’s how Carolina Science Essential Labs fit in your middle school classroom.
The labs are modular, flexible, and nonsequential, allowing you to explore our selection as you choose and mix and match by purchasing individual lab kits or building larger bundles.
Lab kits support three-dimensional learning and let you enjoy hands-on science that meets any standard through activities that correlate to specific textbooks, NGSS, state standards, and curricula.
These self-contained lab kits are ready to use and time-saving, providing instructional notes, reproducible student worksheets, and less common materials. Some also use materials that you likely already have on hand, offering affordable, accessible science and streamlining teacher prep.
Across your district, Essential Labs help with learning recovery or as an intervention tool for science education. They also offer a low barrier to entry—you don’t need to purchase an entire curriculum to see the benefits of engaging, innovative science in your classrooms.
And to meet your unique goals, we help you build a lab program that can accompany whichever textbook, scope and sequence, open-education resource, or custom curriculum you’re using.
Essential Labs are built for your and your students’ success. Students grow through hands-on and data-focused learning experiences and develop fundamental lab skills. You receive standards-aligned labs that are easy to integrate and implement into an existing sequence.
Explore these free sample activities to strengthen your students’ understanding of key concepts across life, earth, and physical sciences.
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